Perils of mental illness in New Zealand

There is a reason why I cherish my husband. On a bleak day when I am feeling particularly miserable, he can make me laugh. This is part of a mail he forwarded.

Three friends from three far-flung corners of the globe corresponding and discussing, as senior citizens are wont to, ailments. Two of the friends have ailing wives undergoing treatment. The third had a few things to say:

One nasty thought that occurs to me is cost -- do you (all) have insurance to cover these things? As I commented before, the NZ health service is perhaps in rather better shape than the UK one, partly because you pay for visits to the doctor and for (part of the cost of) prescriptions, and also because there are good private hospitals that you can choose to go to for lesser ailments without any adverse consequences for your public entitlement; but it is underfunded for its purpose and there are consequent scandals. For instance, at the moment there is no paediatric oncologist in Wellington.

In Dunedin a few years ago, they hired, presumably in desperation, as head of psychiatry a fellow from South Africa who turned out later (if I remember correctly) to have murdered his wife; then, once here, he murdered her replacement. Then his son, also a psychiatrist I think, was found guilty of topping his spouse back in SA. I suppose it could be argued that they had hands-on experience of mental illness. There was also the supposedly Polish female psychiatrist (the name she was using was Linda Astor, not very Polish) who was employed here (in Lower Hutt, actually) and turned out -- after issuing a report that disastrously released some psychopath from detention -- to be neither a qualified psychiatrist nor female, but rather a former medical student, Polish to be sure, who is, as we now say, "transgender", and whose original name was quite different.

I sincerely hope none of my readers will need the services of a shrink while visiting or living in New Zealand.

Cheers!