Neil Phillips

Neil Phillips

I started training in psychiatry back in 1971. I came from Melbourne, Australia, to New York City to work as a resident at Bellevue Hospital and New York University Medical Center. I stayed in New York until 1974 and then returned to Australia and settled in Sydney where I completed my Fellowship in the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and became a consultant psychiatrist.

Although my formal training in psychiatry started in 1971 I had, in a way, been involved in the world of mental health since the nineteen forties. You see my dad was a psychiatrist and just after the second world war we lived at Mont Park, an old psychiatric hospital that lay in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. Our house was about 20 metres from an acute psychiatric ward and my first memories are of playing in a little wire- enclosed sandpit and hearing shouts and screams from the ward and seeing extraordinary things. Although the useful effects of lithium were discovered by John Cade in Melbourne at about that time, it wasn’t until the mid nineteen fifties that other effective medications for psychiatric illness first became available. In those days the psychiatric hospitals were huge, they had farms and factories and if you went in there was a fair chance you would spend many years there and maybe your whole life. As a little child I was cared for by people with mental illness, I loved them and they loved me.

We have come a long way since then but the needs and rights of the mentally ill are still badly neglected and, as our societies get more demanding, competitive and fascinated with ownership of everything, things are getting worse.

All my life I’ve drawn cartoons. The man who opened my eyes to the wonder of drawing was Mr MacKay, an artist and a patient at Mont Park. One day I looked over his shoulder and saw that with a few strokes of a pastel on some old cardboard he made a picture. I remember him like this.

In 1950 my family moved to the place where my dad was the medical superintendent. It was called Travancore and it was a residence for children and adolescents with all sorts of problems, particularly what was known in those days as mental retardation. It was an open sunny place with a school and the kids in the neighbourhood came over to play with the kids who lived there and made a mighty contribution to the mayhem. My dad also travelled around the country helping parents form self-help groups and establish local centres for disturbed and unusual children.

When I finally became a psychiatrist, I worked in private practice for many years but gradually my interests turned to community psychiatry, particularly in rural and remote areas. Eventually, I left private practice to focus on community psychiatry and to help develop appropriate psychiatric services for Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders, Australia's indigenous peoples who are the original owners of Australia. The health problems of indigenous Australians are enormous; they often die young and mental health and social and emotional wellbeing problems lie at the heart of many of the physical health problems. There is a lot to do.

Communicating about emotional and psychiatric problems has always been a major interest of mine and I regularly have the opportunity to do so on a popular afternoon radio show in Sydney, Richard Glover's "Drive" show. Here is a link to the "Mid week Conference" section of the show. To find the broadcasts, type my name into the search field.

The Shrink-Rap books reach far more people than I could ever hope to talk to face to face. It is my hope that the books will be read with enjoyment, ease suffering and increase understanding.

NEIL PHILLIPS