Port Arthur Massacre: Querulous in
Question?
Question?
An Open Letter to Dr Paul Mullen Regarding Martin Bryant *
by Mary Maxwell
To Paul Mullen, Psychiatrist and “Chief of Forensic Psychiatry at Monash University.”
I was shocked to see, when perusing a 2006 article in The Age, that you told that newspaper that Dunblane was the trigger point for Port Arthur.
What? What are you talking about? How could you say that in 2006, completely contradicting what you presented to the DPP in 1996?
Dunblane
The Age article, dated March 29, 2006, is entitled “Shedding Light on the Port Arthur Killer.” (O Gorrrd.) The reporter quotes you as saying:
“He [Martin Bryant] followed Dunblane. His planning started with Dunblane. Before that he was thinking about suicide, but Dunblane and the early portrayal of the killer, Thomas Hamilton, changed everything.”
You know that is not true, Dr Mullen. Did you even write it, or did the media furnish it from their endless stock of ideas to deceive the public? The goal of the real murderers is to persuade us that the real Martin Bryant was at Port Arthur on April 28, 1996. No he was not. You know he was not.
In 1996 you offered a different bunch of misstatements. Have you no conscience?
In the official court case, R v Bryant we see your statement:
“I have prepared this report at the request of Mr Bryant’s legal representative, Mr John Avery. It is based on interview conducted on the 4 May 1996 at the Royal Hobart Hospital, lasting in total some 3 1/2 hours. In addition I had access to extensive documentation.”
Here is your description of your talk with Martin, Beginning on page 361 of the DPP’s transcript (as presented to the Court in November 1996):
“The enormity of Mr Bryant’s crimes call out for some explanation equally dramatic and extraordinary. It is not to be wondered at that the media have either attempted to portray Mr Bryant as afflicted by a dramatic mental illness, such as schizophrenia, or to be some kind of evil genius. In my opinion the origins of this terrible tragedy are not to be found in a single dramatic and sufficient cause, but in the interaction and combination of a range of influences and events. We may never know fully the intentions and state of mind which led to the killings, but a number of contributions are apparent.”
Dr Mullen you may not know “the intentions which led to the killings”, but they certainly were not Bryant’s intentions. They were the intentions of the actual murderers, not some poor patsy.
I continue the quote:
“Mr Bryant is an intellectually limited man who from early childhood showed marked impairment in his capacity to cope with interpersonal and social relationships. He responded to frustrations with aggression towards others and towards property. From an early age his behaviour was characterised by an unfortunate tendency to take delight in the discomfort of others and in the tormenting of people and creatures weaker than himself. This probably reflected in part the struggles of a child who felt buffeted and helpless in the face of the demands of the world and who sought to gain some sense of power, and restore some sense of self-esteem, through ridiculing and hurting others.” [all emphasis in this article is by me, MM]
What’s Your Source?
That is not true. What record of his childhood are you reading from? You did not interview his mother or sister. Whom did he ridicule? From what we see in the two lengthy interviews with Martin – by police on July 4, 1996 and by John Avery in October 1996 — there is no tone of ridicule. No indication that he wanted to hurt others, rather the opposite. He even mentioned that he does not do practice-shooting with glass bottles in case the broken glass would hurt an animal’s foot.
So who are you to tell the Court that this is a personality feature of Martin. Did he ridicule anyone while he was being interviewed by you? Did he strike you as the ridiculing type? I’ll bet not.
You opine, in a sympathetic-sounding way:
“Mr Bryant received considerable support from his father and there are indications in the record during his later adolescence that a degree of stability and more effective social integration was beginning to emerge in this young man. The relationship with Ms Harvey for all its eccentric features probably added to Mr Bryant’s increasing sense of having some place in the world. The death first of Ms Harvey and then the suicide of his father stripped away from Mr Bryant the two main sources of support and stability in his life.”
Well, it would wouldn’t it. By the way do you know that a cop named Phil Pyke told the world that when Martin heard of his Dad’s death he laughed. Of course that cop can say anything, as there is no chance given to Martin to refute anything.
By the way, you must be aware from the publication in The Bulletin in April 2006 that Martin told his lawyer, John Avery, that two doctors at Risdon were trying to brainwash him into not having a trial. Who were those two? They have been disguised in the transcript by Avery as Dr B and Dr D. When you heard of it, did you rush to find out? One of them could be Dr Ian Sale.
Schizo
It looks like your assignment from Avery in 1996 was to make sure no one could claim that the 29 year-old Bryant was unfit to stand trial. To that end you brought up the reference to schizophrenia — to rule it out. I quote you:
“In February 1984 Mr Bryant was assessed by a very experienced clinical psychiatrist, Dr Cunningham-Dax. This assessment was initiated to consider Mr Bryant’s eligibility for a disability pension. Dr Cunningham-Dax stated that Mr Bryant was intellectually handicapped and personality disordered. He also raised the possibility that he might be developing an illness of a schizophrenic type.
“On the basis of this report and subsequent assessments which relied upon it, Mr Bryant was granted a disability pension. There are subsequent references to Mr Bryant having a schizophrenic illness and of being a paranoid schizophrenic in the records of Dr Mather (December 1991) and Dr P M McCartney (December 1991). These diagnostic formulations, it transpired, were not the results of the doctors own conclusions, but based on the report of Mr Bryant’s mother that he had been diagnosed by Dr Cunningham-Dax as suffering from this illness.”
What? A doctor makes a “diagnostic formulation” based on what a mother said a doctor said? Hello? You know no doctor ever does that. He or she would look at the records and examine the patient. This is all getting to be absurd.
Not So Freudian Slip
At one point (this is kind of funny) you made a slip. The judge of course could have ordered that the record not show it but Justice William Cox did not object and needless to say the ‘defense” lawyer John Avery said noting. I quote you:
“[Martin] described his pleasure in life as watching the television, music and killing. – sorry, I’ll reread that. “Mr Bryant described his pleasure in life as watching the television, music and drinking. The music that he most favoured was the sound track of the Lion King and records made by Cliff Richard. On direct questioning he acknowledged that he spent a considerable amount of time watching videos and going to the pictures.”
Your Mike Willessee Chatter
Now for the 2016 “twentieth anniversary” TV show hosted by Mike Willessee. You said of Bryant:
“He wanted to be seen as powerful and evil. Some of the early news coverage which portrayed him as demonic was exactly what he wanted — delighted him.”
Ahem, did he say to you “Dr Mullen, the news coverage delighted me?” Did he say that at your one-and-only meeting with him, dated May 4 – five days after his burns? Martin claims he was not allowed to see TV or read papers – and that hospital personnel were not allowed to tell him what the Port Arthur massacre was all about.
So how did you know he was delighted? Do you have ESP?
What about My Querulousness?
I see from Pubmed that you have written about those of us who go to court to seek redress. I quote you:
“Querulous paranoia was once of considerable clinical and academic interest in psychiatry. Over the last 40 years, however, it has virtually disappeared from the professional landscape. This decline occurred [when folks were] asserting their individual rights through the pursuit of claims and grievances …. through which they seek their vision of justice”.
Their vision? Is “due process” a personal hallucination? I continue:
“This article examines querulous behaviour in the vexatious litigant …. The phenomenological and nosological issues [diagnosis] are outlined and the risks of the emergence of threatening and violent behaviour is emphasized.
“Threats should not be ignored, for a variety of reasons. Approaches to managing querulous behaviour in the courts and the complaint organizations are discussed …Those caught up in a querulous pursuit of their notion of justice are amenable to management that can ameliorate their suffering and reduce the disruption they create.”
Just simply Wow.
Aramoana
Finally, but you knew I was coming to this, Doctor? Aramoana, New Zealand. The killing spree by David Grey, at which Michael Dyson handled the SOG response. You handled the psychiatry. So, everybody wants to know: why were you living in Aramoana of all places, a nice, cosmopolitan Melburnian like You?
People are dying to know. I’m waiting to see what you can come up with. Maybe an elderly aunt asked you to visit or something? Maybe you study a particular species of conch native to the area?
As recently as August 12, 2015 the Canberra Times recounted your glories:
“He interviewed Martin Bryant, the man who shot 35 people dead in the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, and Hoddle Street mass murderer Julian Knight, who he more recently assessed as being unlikely to repeat the random shooting spree that killed seven in Melbourne in 1987. He worked on the Snowtown murders in the 1990s, also known as the bodies-in-barrels case, which has been described as Australia’s worst serial killings. [They forgot Aramoana.]
“Professor Mullen has also worked as an expert assessor for the US Army defence team acting for former Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks, and assessed Bali nine pair Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran years before their execution.”
What was the point of an Australian shrink studying prisoners caught in the Indonesian justice system? And what did you do at Chelmsford?
“The court appointed [Mullen] as its expert in the Chelmsford Hospital medical negligence case, the largest of its kind to date, which sued for the devastating use of electroconvulsive and deep-sleep therapy on patients with mental illness.”
Never mind I don’t want to know.
–Mary Maxwell is an elderly querulous American Australian with a bee in her bonnet about the continued incarceration of a patsy in Oz, Martin Bryant, and a patsy in US: Jahar Tsarnaev.
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