I’m going to tweet the voices of those who are NOT going to be heard or discussed at this hearing.
This is Alison. She would be at the #DisabilityRoyalCommission but she’s dead.
@DRC_AU
Dead mad voices. Think of me as your friendly medium. They say it’s better than being large.

2/ Alison died at Graylands in WA. It’s a psych hospital. An awful old asylum. I think it should be razed to the ground and the ground sown with salt.

She was 47 when she died in 2010.

3/ Alison was an involuntary patient. She left school at sixteen and had the usual tumultuous teenage relationship with mum and dad. Moved out at 18, moved in with her sister. Moved out with another girl. Relationship issues, started having ‘psychiatric symptoms’.

4/ She got quieter. Didn’t make much sense, sometimes. Got angry, sometimes more than normally angry. Drove a car into her mum’s leg. Two of her sisters had a mh condition. Didn’t want to be admitted so they referred her to - Graylands. Anxiety and psychosis, they said.

5/ Way back in 81. They put her in Graylands, the worst place imaginable for that girl. She started hallucinating and running round naked. Stopped eating. They piled the diagnoses on her like rocks on the grave of a still alive but improperly buried young woman.

6/ And then she fell pregnant. Sometimes she acknowledged the pregnancy, sometimes she denied it, the Coroner said. Like she was making choices. She terminated the pregnancy. She was going to the Balga Clinic.
Balga, btw, is the Bronx of WA.

7/ And then she asked to be admitted again. Paranoid psychosis, they told her. Except that she’d been raped. That doesn’t seem like a particularly paranoid response to me. She was going to be put before a court to testify. She was terrified. Anxious, they said.

8/ Paranoid, they said. She went home. Suicidal ideation, they said. And then she discovered she was pregnant.
The prosecutors decided not to call her as a witness. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Went home. Later, had a baby boy. Was unable to cope, they said.

9/ Yet another involuntary admission. Over and over. Went home to live with her sister. Readmitted. Worked in retail. Tired so self medicated on stimulants. Got thinner, madder. She couldn’t cope with the stress of looking after her 11 month old son, they said.

10/ Oh Amanda, I see how you tried. Despite what they wrote in your file, even in this account by the Coroner. I see it, so do we other mothers, including those who brought up children alone while mad. We see you. (Pic by Mary Leunig)

11/ By Orwell’s Year, 1984, she was poor, broken, mad, without hope. Hadn’t slept for four nights. They put her on thioridazine and fluphenazine. Four weeks before they had put her on lithium and stelazine. She went home. They said she was doing well, but ‘refused to comply’.

12/ In Feb 1985 she jumped out of a window with a mattress. Alison thought she was on a surfboard. Wasn’t hurt, but there were more drugs, more diagnoses, more words. Modecate, lithium. Back to parents, the parents she fought with constantly. Discharged with follow up.

13/ And then she went to her childhood playroom and she took some twine and she hanged herself by her neck. Her brother found her. Nobody knew that she wanted to suicide, they said.
Her brother in law cut her down breathed into her lungs and kept her alive until they got there.

14/ But now Alison was doomed, despite being alive. You see, she had an ABI. Our spinal wards and abi clinics are filled with failed suicides, @DRC_AU. You are erasing them today because academic voices in discrete areas. You are erasing Alison.

15/ There was nowhere for Alison and other young brain injured adults. These days, there’s a special institution. Back then, there was no funding. They tried to put her in Ward 11, but she couldn’t live there.
So - Graylands forever, to be tortured and killed. That was her fate.

16/ My tweets are disappearing and I do not know why. But you can read the rest here. https://www.coronerscourt.wa.gov.au/I/inquest_into_the_death_of_amanda_alison_gilbert.aspx

It is too depressing to recount. She died an awful death, that woman. And was blamed, over and over.

17/ Alison was raped hundreds and hundreds of times in care. And finally, she died of lithium toxicity.

Please make this stop for disabled people, @DRC_AU. And please call those who have murdered us to account.