CALLAN PARK: ‘THE JEWEL OF THE WEST’

About the Book

This book is a record of events that happened at Callan Park before 1960. It is a journey of discovery that uncovers facts and manoeuvring not published before. In time dramatic changes did happen; there was a paradigm shift from mothering to encouraging independence. The government’s predominant focus, through its bureaucrats, was on costs, structure, and process. Others had different ideas. The change came through a handful of unlikely people; a female psychiatrist and her friends, two young nurses, one psychopathic doctor, a patient’s brother, a few buck-passing bureaucrats, a newspaper, and a Royal Commission. This story involves the CIA. Sexual favours; one doctor proudly claimed that there were three things necessary for a happy life, “…to eat in style, to drive in style and to f… in style.” The use of spies to gather information for personal gain or write headlines for a paper. Political gameplay and deals. Lies and empire builders, hatchet people and scapegoats. Callan Park is littered with the refuse of dedicated staff who succumbed to suicide, alcoholism, PTSD, depression, and family breakdown—written off as collateral damage. Treatments for psychiatric conditions are continually changing, not necessarily due to scientific advances. A popular treatment in the 1920s was isolation, an aperient in the 1940s and 50s, brain surgery, psychotropic drugs and LSD in the 1950s and 60s. The stage was set to usher in a revolution in the care and treatment of people with a mental health problem and to experience the worse of political intervention. Volume two explores these two concepts.

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