Preventing suicide
Interview with Peter Fitzpatrick The Western Australian State Suicide Prevention Strategy was introduced in 2009, with the State government allocating $13 million for its implementation. Peter Fitzpatrick, Chair of the Ministerial Council for Suicide Prevention (MCSP) since July 2011, sat down to answer a few questions about the Strategy. Q Peter, can you tell us a little about yourself and the work you do? I started my working career with 20 years in the military and then spent 11 years as the Chief Executive Office of the Law Society of Western Australia. I also worked for former Prime Minister, John Howard MP, in a strategic role for 12 months and have run my own business for a while. My most recent appointment was as Chief Executive Officer of the Motor Industry, here in WA. Now I mentor 18 CEOs of different companies, I chair about four boards, sit on some others involving not for profit and private companies, and I do some teaching for the Institute of Company Directors Strategic Planning, Keynote Speaking and Leadership Training. Q What led you to Mental Health? I guess it all started back in the late 1980s when I was the President of Outcare, which is an organisation responsible for rehabilitation of ex offenders. It became quite obvious to me that the prison system in fact made people worse, and I had a conversation with the then Chief Justice, Sir Frances Burt who said that we really need to go back to supporting the young people and prevent them coming into the system. That led me to establish what is now known as Youth Focus. In 1990, I became the founding Chairman, and started to see some of the enormous trauma out there in the community amongst young people with mental disorders caused by drug taking, and major incidence of physical and sexual abuse. There were a lot of problems with families and
adolescent/parent relationships. I saw this first hand and at a pretty raw stage, so I stayed as the Chairman of that organisation for about seven or eight years. I finally handed it over in about 1998. I have been passionate about mental health ever since, more recently in Aboriginal and veteran communities. Q Where was the Strategy in relation to progress when you became chair of the MCSP? The concern at the time was that the Strategy was a very difficult program to get off the ground. There had been a change of agencies administering the program, and through no one’s direct fault, there were only a few community action plans coming forward for approval. But the process of trying to get communities to provide the information that we needed from them to be able to run their own programmes took a lot of time and effort. So the focus was initially on trying to increase the number of communities involved in the strategy in a more productive way. Q Do you think the strategy is unique? The Strategy is innovative and I think the Minister and the Government should be commended for it; because it is community based whereas the typical approach by Government when it tries to allocate
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