✨ Why This Matters

Every person in crisis deserves care, not punishment. Yet across Australia, people experiencing mental health distress are still being chemically sedated, physically restrained, or locked in isolation rooms—often without consent, legal safeguards, or trauma-informed care. These practices can retraumatise, degrade, and even endanger lives.

I know, because it happened to me.

✨ My Lived Experience

I’ve been repeatedly restrained, sedated, and denied basic dignity in hospital settings. I was chemically sedated without informed consent. I was physically restrained in wrist locks for over an hour, causing injury and trauma. I was denied access to a private toilet, left in soiled clothes, and refused support from nominated advocates.

At my most vulnerable, I experienced degrading treatment that contributed to a miscarriage — all because I raised my voice and asked for dignity and passed out brochures on Ryan’s rule to everyone around me. I was seen as a threat and a nuisance.

I asked staff four times to call my nominated support persons. No one did. I was discharged alone, without appropriate care or follow-up. These experiences were not isolated — and they are still happening to others. I have this all on Police RTI Body Worn Camera Footage. With one of the officers saying the reason I couldn’t use a private bathroom was “It’s because we don’t like you she obviously hasn’t heard of her right to remain silent - that’s my favourite one” all chuckling together around PSO’s and Staff. I am just happy I didn’t hear this on the night. 

Despite reporting this to oversight bodies, including the Office of the Health Ombudsman and Queensland Health, there has been no justice or accountability.

✨ What Needs to Change

I am calling for an Independent Lived Experience Commissioner — someone whose role is to protect people, not departments.

We call on the Commonwealth Government, state and territory health ministers, and all relevant oversight bodies to take immediate action:
    1.    Legally prohibit the use of seclusion and physical/chemical restraint in mental health and disability settings
    2.    Mandate independent OPCAT-compliant inspections in all locked and closed wards
    3.    Fund co-designed, peer-led crisis response alternatives to ED and police-based interventions
    4.    Mandate trauma-informed, culturally safe, and rights-based training for all mental health and emergency staff
    5.    Recognise coercive control, moral injury, and institutional harm in healthcare settings

Australia Is Still in Breach of Its UN Anti-Torture Obligations

Despite signing the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT) over 15 years ago and ratifying it seven years ago, Australia remains in breach of its obligations under this international human rights treaty. OPCAT requires countries to establish independent monitoring bodies — known as National Preventive Mechanisms (NPMs) — to inspect places of detention such as psychiatric wards, prisons, and disability institutions.

The Federal Government offered one-off funding to states and territories to support OPCAT implementation, but this expired in June 2024. Only Tasmania and the ACT accepted the offer. Major jurisdictions like Queensland, Victoria, and New South Wales refused, demanding ongoing Commonwealth funding.

Since then, OPCAT has been completely removed from the 2025–26 Federal Budget, and no new agreement has been reached. Australia’s three largest states still have not nominated NPMs, and no funding has been committed to ensure proper monitoring or UN compliance.

This means thousands of Australians — particularly those in mental health and disability settings — are still detained without independent oversight or protection from cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment. Australia is now knowingly and indefinitely non-compliant with its international human rights obligations.

“Australia: second-highest in the world for involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation — yet UN inspectors were blocked because ‘patients deserve their privacy’. In the QLD Mental Act 2016”

✨ This Goes Beyond One Story

Since experiencing this trauma, I’ve lodged formal complaints, submitted Right to Information (RTI) requests, and prepared submissions to the Australian Human Rights Commission, the Commonwealth Attorney-General, and the United Nations Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture (OPCAT).

This isn’t just about me — it’s about protecting every vulnerable person in care.

If you’d like to learn more or support this work, you can visit:
👉 www.mentallywell.club

This submission is not about vengeance or personal grievance. It is about breaking the silence.

I was initially a voluntary patient, begging for help, and was put in seclusion on Mother’s Day for trying to email a lawyer. Staff refused to charge my laptop. Whose privacy were they protecting?”

This failure puts vulnerable lives at risk. It cannot be ignored any longer.

Australia had the second highest rate of involuntary hospitalisation in a study of 22 countries across Europe, Australia and New Zealand (Rains et al. 2019).

The National Mental Health Consumer and Carer Forum’s stated position is that the rate of involuntary treatment in Australia remains too high (NMHCCF 2020).

📣 

Advocacy Statement: Suicide Prevention Requires More Than Sympathy

✨ Prime Minister Albanese has called suicide prevention a personal priority, stating that “a compassionate nation like ours simply cannot allow the suffering of our fellow Australians to continue unabated.” Yet every day, nine Australians die by suicide, and an estimated 65,000 more will attempt it this year.

✨ My Legacy, and My Commitment to Reform

This fight is also deeply personal. I was raised by an educator and human rights advocate — my late mother, Roslyn Fischer, who co-founded the Griffith University Speech Contest in 1980 and dedicated her life to empowering others through language and dignity. Her legacy fuels mine.

To carry this forward, I’m building Mentally Well Club — a national advocacy platform for reform in mental health and disability care. It will serve as a hub for patient rights, trauma-informed training, peer-led crisis alternatives, and policy education for professionals and the public.

If this petition is ignored, I am willing to pursue a Royal Commission into the use and abuse of restrictive practices in health and disability systems across Australia. I will not stop advocating — for as long as it takes.

 

🗳️ Add Your Voice

This petition will be submitted to:
• The Commonwealth Attorney-General
• The Australian Human Rights Commission
• The UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture

Please sign and share this petition. Together, we can restore dignity, safety, and justice to Australia’s mental health system.

🔗 change.org/mentallywellclub

✨ Today, I honour my Mother's legacy by fighting for trauma-informed, rights-based, accessible mental health and disability care — especially for those who, unlike me, don’t have English as a first language or don’t have access to the internet to look up their rights. For those silenced by coercive control, isolation, institutionalisation, or fear.

I am particularly passionate about early intervention — starting as early as kindergarten. We need to educate children about emotion regulation, trauma, consent, dignity, and respect long before crisis arises. Prevention begins with language, safety, and empathy — not restraint.

Through Mentally Well Club, I am building a multilingual app and YouTube channel to bring patient rights education into every ward, every school, every language, and every locked setting — for patients, clinicians, and communities. My work is pro bono and grounded in lived experience, grief, hope, and an unrelenting belief in justice.

This is for my mother. For the children who don’t yet have words. For the elders who were never given them. And for those who are still waiting to be heard.

✨ Let’s demand a system that heals, not harms.

My Name Is Olivia — I’m Speaking Out So Others Don’t Have To Suffer in Silence.

Please stand with me. Share this petition. Tell your story. Let’s make sure no one else is treated as invisible.

 

✨ As someone who was a voluntary patient begging for help, I know how compassion in theory often fails in practice. On Mother’s Day, I was subjected to what the United Nations defines as incommunicado detention — the deprivation of liberty without the ability to communicate with the outside world. I was sedated, isolated, and held for hours and hours without any contact being made with my family, despite pleading for help. My only request was to charge my laptop so I could email a lawyer.

I am not proud of this and it has deeply traumatised me but out of pure desperation, I jumped the reception counter to retrieve my charger — not out of aggression, but out of survival. I was terrified and silenced. Rather than receiving support, I was punished with sedation and isolation.

✨ According to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, “prolonged incommunicado detention may facilitate torture or ill-treatment and itself constitutes a form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

What makes this even more dangerous is that Queensland Health staff — including security guards — are not required to undertake mandatory suicide prevention training. These are often the first responders in a mental health emergency — yet they may have no training in trauma, suicidality, or how to de-escalate. This is not just a gap — it is a systemic design flaw.

✨ I have tried to engage with reform efforts. I have repeatedly contacted the Mental Health Commission requesting that I be allowed to sign the National Seclusion and Restraint Declaration. To this day, it remains unavailable for digital signature, despite numerous emails. It’s hard not to conclude that this delay is intentional — that lived experience voices are being excluded from this critical accountability mechanism.

✨ I believe all Australian governments must take responsibility for acting on the data about seclusion and restraint. They must report on their progress, publicly and consistently.

And if they won’t — I will. I intend to track and report progress independently through Mentally Well Club, to ensure survivors, advocates, and the public have access to transparent, lived-experience-informed updates on seclusion, restraint, and human rights in mental health care.

✨ If the Prime Minister is truly committed to suicide prevention, we must move from rhetoric to reform. That includes:

Enacting a National Suicide Prevention Act to embed mental health accountability across all government portfolios.
Ending restrictive practices — including incommunicado detention, restraint, and chemical sedation.
Mandating suicide prevention, trauma-informed care, and de-escalation training for all public hospital staff and security personnel.
Recognising that poverty, housing instability, and trauma are not moral failings — they are suicide risk factors.

✨ Suicide cannot be prevented by punishing distress, withholding communication, or denying rights. It can only be prevented by changing the systems that silence people in pain.

We must be the voice not only for those we’ve lost — but for those still here, still surviving, and still being failed.