“The brain is still a largely unknown quantity. It’s the Dark Continent before Livingstone. We’re only beginning to explore its geography, let alone the actions wrought by the multi-billion connections between its constituent parts,” writes “The Gadfly” columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.

AS a 17-year-old, my mother took me to a big ward full of mental patients at the massive Brisbane public hospital complex. It was a halfway house to the official Goodna Asylum on the road to Ipswich. It felt like something from the previous century. 

Mum often visited distant relatives and friends who had fallen on hard times and on this occasion, it was the latter: “Cec” by name, he’d had what was then called a nervous breakdown. He’d lost his bearings, shouted a lot and become uncontrollable. 

He was a little bloke who’d spent his life in the bush as a station hand. After the boss sacked him, his wife, “Bonny” in the argot of the day, “couldn’t do a thing with him”. So, they called the cops, and he finished up, drugged to the eyeballs with lithium, in the big dormitory where a doctor would decide his fate. 

Mum brought me along because I was jackarooing at the time, and she thought I might bring him “out of his shell” with stories of my time at the property where we ran 6000 sheep and 500 cattle. 

I didn’t exactly jump at the chance but I had a few stories, mostly of me getting bucked off horses or being chased by a bull. 

But I also had a good one of Dave, a fellow jackaroo, who boasted he could pick up a brown snake by the tail and snap its head off the way you crack a stockwhip. But when Neil, our other jackaroo, challenged him to do it with a big black snake that was actually dead, the first twirl around his head went wrong and the snake’s head hit Dave on the neck and stayed there, fangs first.

Well, Dave’s antics and squeals were the funniest thing I’d ever seen, and I still laugh about it when I write it; but it actually brought Cec out of his semi-coma for his first chuckle in a month. And he was still smiling when we left.

Anyway, he didn’t go to Goodna, but we lost touch with him and Bonny and I don’t know how he finished up. But I’m reminded of this by the kerfuffle now exercising the commentariat and the parliamentarians about the government’s decision to halve the mental health visits to psychiatrists or psychologists from 20 to 10, at a time when there aren’t even enough practitioners to meet the new deal.

The community’s suicide rate hasn’t fallen. In fact, it was higher before covid than it was all those years ago when Cec had his breakdown and psychiatrists were rare as hen’s teeth. 

It wouldn’t matter if the government doubled the number of psychiatrists. Until we learn more about the brain and the nervous system, it’s arguably an exercise in self-delusion and money down the drain.

The brain is still a largely unknown quantity. It’s the Dark Continent before Livingstone. We’re only beginning to explore its geography, let alone the actions wrought by the multi-billion connections between its constituent parts. 

Yet backbenchers are outraged, do-gooders tearful, and after every second ABC program the host says: “If anything has caused you distress (or whatever) call Lifeline on 131114 or Beyond Blue 1300 224636”. I doubt their “counsellors” are all psychiatrists; but hopefully they’ll at least have a good snake story.

robert@robertmacklin.com