The Plight of the Hunter

Abstract

In no country is it simple for psychiatry to deliver its services equitably; in Australia it has proven seriously difficult. All this new Babel and diversity, spread over unfamiliar distances, compound this incapacity in psychiatry. Yet Australia is by many measures a fortunate country. The fabled Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have never darkened its skies — if we still conceive of war, famine, pestilence and death as our greatest threats. Poverty, strangely enough, is not the essential threat which it is elsewhere for mankind. Egalitarian health and welfare provisions enable the poorest patients to consult specialists, either public or private, without personal cost. Of course, poor people may not choose to take advantage of this, nor does the psychiatric profession place itself strategically for them if they did. Psychiatry builds few bridges.