Joel Couch stabbed five women and a male security guard to death.
Sydney:
No one can know what was going through Sydney shopping center killer Joel Cauchi’s mind, but psychiatrists say one root cause of his rampage is obvious: he suffered from schizophrenia and stopped taking medication and quit received treatment.
Since the knife attack at Bondi Junction on April 13, people have been searching for a baffling motive. The attack left five women and a male security guard stabbed to death and a dozen others injured, including a nine-month-old girl.
Couch’s parents said their son was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 17 and successfully treated for about 18 years.
Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder that can cause hallucinations, delusions, and disordered behavior. It requires lifelong treatment.
New South Wales Police Commissioner Karen Webber said it was “clear” to her and detectives that Couch, 40, was targeting women and avoiding men, sparking a debate about misogyny in Australian media.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese called the gender ratio among victims “worrying” and vowed to do more to combat violence against women, citing the deaths of one woman every week at the hands of men they know. event.
“But we will never know what is going on in the minds of the perpetrators of these behaviours,” said Professor Ian Hickey, co-director of health and policy at the University of Sydney’s Center for Brain and Mind.
“Ordinary people are trying to impose a rational explanation,” he told AFP. “The most obvious thing is the irrational thinking of the perpetrators.”
Hickey said a relapse in mental illness did not in itself explain violence against others, which was “extremely rare.”
“Often these things are complicated by other factors: drug use, disconnection, social isolation, homelessness.”
No two psychopaths have the same thoughts, Hickey said, and those thoughts are shaped by each person’s unique, irrational view of the world.
Couch may have attacked women simply because men were better able to defend themselves – like Frenchman Damien Guerreud, who calls himself a hero for fighting off his attacker with a metal pole.
“Seriously mentally ill”
“The broader issue of domestic violence and the number of women who are harmed or killed by men who don’t have any mental illness is a national problem in our country. I don’t think this is just a symptom of that problem,” Hickey said. .
“The important social factors here are homelessness and isolation, and the stigma around mental illness treatment.”
Couch’s parents said that over the years, he gradually stopped taking his medication after consulting doctors because he felt he was doing well. He moved from his home in Toowoomba, Queensland, to the state capital Brisbane and most recently to Sydney.
Since leaving home, he has been living in his car and hotels, with only sporadic contact with his family via text messages.
Patrick McGorry, a professor of adolescent mental health at the University of Melbourne, said he seemed unaware that he was ill and “became homeless, completely cut off from any source of support and eventually fell into a very severe psychotic state”.
McGorry, a former president of Schizophrenia International, said his behavior was “completely disorganized or based on delusions.”
Attempts to attribute Couch’s actions to misogyny are “completely unjustified.”
“This is purely an untreated or poorly treated mental illness,” he said.
The report highlights Australia’s mental health system is “wholly inadequate” to ensure patients like Couch receive ongoing care.
“He does want to move to the city but in this case health care facilities should be set up for him at his destination,” McGorry said.
He told AFP that if schizophrenia patients stop taking their medication, there is more than an 80% chance that the disease will relapse.
“When it comes back, the person most likely won’t realize it’s coming back and won’t seek help.”
nowhere to go
Caroline Nikolowski, chief executive of Australia’s top advocacy group Mental Health Australia, said there were gaps in support for people with complex care needs.
She told AFP that people were often turned away from hospital emergency rooms because their conditions were not considered serious enough at the time.
“It’s a common experience that they have nowhere else to go,” Nikolowski said.
“We know that overall mental health spending does not meet the burden of disease and that it has declined over time.”
Professor Anthony Harris, head of the department of psychiatry at Sydney Medical School with a special interest in psychiatry, said the health system was failing to catch those who fell into trouble.
“The real issue is that this person was diagnosed with schizophrenia – one of the most serious mental illnesses – but he was out of care and out of the community,” he said.
“If you have cancer, if you have a serious physical illness, there’s a whole system of aftercare,” Harris said. But with severe mental illness, “no one seems to blink.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
