No Better Down Under –
Mar. 9, 2019 – Suicide attempts, spells in psychiatric wards and electric shock therapy followed — now she is hostage to an ice habit, dying for a smoke. In the battle to simultaneously treat her 24-year-old daughter’s illness and addiction, Josie feels like she has fallen into a mental health system “black hole”. She longs for some kind of cosmic coincidence so her daughter gets off the streets and past the “glorified holding pen” of hospital admissions. “It’s like a solar eclipse,” she says. The Victorian Government plans to double the number of public drug residential rehabilitation beds from 208 in 2015 to 492, but desperate parents are still turning to costly private clinics, in a bid to save their children from a life of drug abuse and crime.
