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Care and protection issues

… why is DoCS taking proceedings? They are taking proceedings because they don’t think the parent has the capacity to look after the kids. Very often it will be because of allegations of mental illness and/or substance abuse; the child is just sitting there and not being fed, nappies are not being changed. The kids themselves can be at risk … DoCS could consider that the level of services which a family might need to address the capacity issues of a parent might be simply too great..²⁰⁹

Consultations indicated that care and protection under state child welfare law can be an issue facing parents who have a mental illness. In particular, a number of service providers believed that if DoCS is notified about the child of a person with a mental illness, that parent’s mental illness may be taken into account when assessing the wellbeing and safety of the child.²¹⁰

I do believe that people with a mental illness are discriminated against as being incompetent people … [P]eople … hear of a diagnosis of a mental illness, and they immediately think that they are incompetent, they immediately think that they are unpredictable, unreliable, and unsafe.²¹¹

I can think of several examples where complainants have come to us specifically with complaints against DoCS … The ones that I am thinking of actually have been diagnosed with a mental illness, and feel that … their behavioural capacities or otherwise have been mis-assessed, or not adequately assessed, and then that fuels into the assessment of their capacity to parent, and the department’s ensuing involvement with them.²¹²

If DoCS is notified about a child whose wellbeing is at risk, they have a legislative duty of care to do what is in the best interests of the child at risk. A manager from DoCS stated that when they are notified about a child at risk, they do a risk analysis on the current situation facing the child. They use the expertise of a variety of experts (such as psychiatrists and psychologists) to inform their decisions.²¹³ She also argued that although mental health issues do figure very heavily in the risk analysis of children at risk, care and protection issues usually arise out of a combination of factors (such as domestic violence and mental health issues):

It could be because they are not capable of adequately supervising them. It could be because they are exposed to terrible domestic violence. It could be because they are exposed to psychological harm. It could also be because they are not supervising the child and the child is being neglected or sexually assaulted. So when we get a report and the primary thing is that the carer has a mental health issue, it is not just because they have a mental health illness per se; it is the impact of the caring for that child. It may be a whole heap of issues and because of their mental health condition they are not able to address those issues adequately.²¹⁴

In addition to removing children, DoCS also has a wide range of other options available to it, including referring families to other services for assistance. However, service providers argued that DoCS is not always able to take up the option to refer people to services for assistance because it is limited by a lack of available services for people with a mental illness.²¹⁵ A manager from DoCS said:

Sometimes a big problem is that we have no one to refer to … we can only focus on assessment and then taking the appropriate action. We don’t provide services ourselves as such. We don’t do counselling or therapy or those sorts of things.²¹⁶

In this study, four participants who had children had come into contact with DoCS. One participant said that when she was hospitalised, the hospital had notified DoCS about her children, although they were not removed.²¹⁷ Three other parents, who were also homeless, had their children previously removed by DoCS.²¹⁸