“A catastrophic failure of leadership at all levels” says the Royal Commissioner into Defence and Veteran Suicide. Veteran Stuart McCarthy reports on the RC and reaction by Australian soldiers.
The long awaited report of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide has recommended the government establish a brain injury rehabilitation program to include the victims of notorious Army antimalarial drug trials conducted in East Timor and Papua New Guinea at the turn of the century.
Decrying “a catastrophic failure of leadership at all levels,” former deputy NSW Police Commissioner Nick Kaldas and his fellow Royal Commissioners Peggy Brown and James Douglas yesterday handed their seven volume final report to Governor-General Sam Mostyn.
The report includes 122 recommendations and says that from 1985 to 2021 there were 2,007 confirmed deaths by suicide among those who had served in the defence force since 1985. That figure, says the report, underestimates the problem because it excludes deaths where the intent of the individual could not be determined, such as single motor vehicle accidents.
The Final Report of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide has now been tabled in Parliament and is available to the public. It contains 122 recommendations for reform. Read more:https://t.co/Oi9rDyb8WH pic.twitter.com/ukuDWWsPy1
— Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide (@roycommDVSRC) September 9, 2024
One such suspicious accident involved former Army medic and East Timor veteran David Whitfield, who died in a single vehicle crash in February this year.
Yesterday’s Royal Commission report was bittersweet for David’s widow Alison. The couple appeared on the ABC’s QandA program last year, literally begging Veterans’ Affairs Minister Matt Keogh for help in dealing with his department’s bureaucrats.
David told a live national audience about his severe mental health problems and multiple suicide attempts, dating back to his involvement in one of the Army’s ant-malarial drug trials in East Timor in 2001. His Army medical records confirm he was prescribed mefloquine, a drug linked to numerous documented suicides, suicide attempts, psychosis and chronic neurological health conditions since the 1990s.
A 2014 report from the European drug safety regulator says “there is a strong suspicion that mefloquine can cause different kinds of permanent brain damage” at the same preventative doses used by the Australian Army.
Alison says David was traumatised by his involvement as a medic in a drug trial involving fellow soldiers under his care. “I fucked up or killed those blokes … they are dead or head-fucked like me,” David told Alison some time before his death. The couple both testified to the Royal Commission, in two of almost 900 private sessions held across the country over the past three years.
One of the key recommendations in yesterday’s report is that the defence and veterans affairs departments “should establish a brain injury program that covers, at a minimum, relevant … serving and ex-serving members exposed to mefloquine and/or tafenoquine.”
Both drugs were developed by the U.S. military, and trialled on thousands of Australian military personnel in East Timor and Papua New Guinea at the turn of the century. The latter drug – tafenoquine – was approved by the Australian drug safety regulator, based in part on the results of the Australian Army drug trials, at the same time dozens of witnesses were questioning the integrity of the drug trial reports during a 2018 Senate inquiry.
The drug was then used in a U.S. Army-funded post approval safety study involving Perth university students.
The Royal Commission’s report also raises concerns about the ethics of the drug trials and the conduct of a 2015-16 Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force inquiry into complaints from the drug trial subjects, which cleared the senior military and medical hierarchy of wrongdoing.
To bring the Royal Commission’s recommendation to fruition, advocates for the affected veterans and families now face the prospect of re-engaging a toxic veterans affairs bureaucracy labelled as “byzantine”, “archaic” and “not fit for purpose” in this and a multitude of previous inquiry reports.
MWM can reveal that a pilot “Mending Military Minds” neuro-cognitive health program, cited in the Royal Commission report, aimed at providing brain injury rehabilitation for the adversely affected drug trial subjects and other veterans affected by blast or other head injuries, was dumped without explanation during the controversial, billion-dollar veteran centric reform program, amid allegations of gaslighting and corruption.
A 2018 Senate inquiry into the defence force’s use of the drugs recommended the program be “prioritised”, and key advocates were invited to co-design the program with senior officials from the Open Arms veterans counselling service.
Charles Sturt University’s Professor Jane Quinn welcomed the Royal Commission’s report and is hopeful the recommendation will see the program resurrected, saying she “was surprised it was discontinued in the first place, given its early success.”
Re-establishing the program that had previously been built by co-design, and was being successfully delivered, seems low-hanging fruit to me @DVAAus
— Prof Jane Quinn🧑🏼⚕️🐂🐂🐂 (@JaneCQuinn1) September 9, 2024
The widow of a British Army officer who died by suicide after experiencing a severe adverse reaction to mefloquine in 2006, Quinn is a neuro-toxicologist who has published numerous academic papers on the toxic effects of the quinoline class of antimalarials, and her expert testimony is quoted in yesterday’s Royal Commission report. She told MWM:
“Re-establishment of this program, and widespread extension of its remit, should be a key outcome of the Royal Commission and would benefit veterans and their families nationwide.”
Sources involved in the program have told MWM they were initially positive Mending Military Minds would see much needed help for chronically ill veterans and their families, including those vulnerable to suicide. But after years of delays, the program simply “disappeared” without explanation.
The head of Open Arms who led the earlier co-design process has since left the organisation, replaced by another veterans affairs official at the centre of a scandal involving referrals to the National Anti-Corruption Commission and allegations of gaslighting targeted at recruits of the Mending Military Minds program.
Well….. so very angry this was not implemented when Stuart first took it to an inquiry. Maybe just maybe Dave would be living a life he deserved. Happy our future hero’s will be cared for and get the help we begged for and didn’t
— Alison Whitfield (@AlisonW13896068) September 9, 2024
MWM can also reveal that advocates begged Veterans Affairs Minister Matt Keogh to restore the program and other initiatives to support veterans involved in the drug trials, at an April 2023 meeting in Brisbane after the Whitfields’ appearance on the ABC.
“I don’t know whether to be happy or angry,” Alison Whitfield said yesterday, in response to the Royal Commission report. “Keogh could have helped Dave,” she told MWM, “but now he’s dead. At least if they finally make this program happen now, it might help some of the other veterans Dave wanted to help.”
Royal Commission into Veteran Suicide confronts lawfare, cronyism and a bureaucratic nightmare
Stuart McCarthy is a medically retired Australian Army officer whose 28-year military career included deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, Africa, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Stuart is an advocate for veterans with brain injury, disabilities, drug trial subjects and abuse survivors. Twitter: @StuartMcCarthy_