When Repat Doctors Called Traumatised Veterans 'Phony Cronies'

In 1963, a group of Australian doctors used the letters pages of the Medical Journal of Australia to describe veterans on psychiatric pensions as 'phony cronies', 'dead-beats', 'drongos' and 'inadequate members of society'. These were not outsiders. They were the doctors the Repatriation Department paid to examine and treat returned servicemen. A 2023 paper by University of Newcastle historian Dr Effie Karageorgos, published in the journal Medical History, goes through what they wrote and where those attitudes came from.

It is worth knowing about if you have ever felt doubted by a doctor, a delegate or your own chain of command over a mental health condition. The language has changed since 1963. Karageorgos argues that some of the thinking behind it has not, and the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide heard evidence that backs her up.

The letter that started it

On 3 August 1963, a doctor writing under the pen name 'Parkinson's Disciple' accused the Repatriation Department (the Repat) of proving Parkinson's law, the idea that government departments invent work to justify their own existence. The letter claimed 'too much is being spent on the "phonies"', gave examples of veterans paid pensions for conditions the author said were non-existent or unrelated to service, and urged the Federal Government to take 'stricter control' of entitlements. The Canberra Times picked it up the same day under the headline 'Doctor Attacks Department'.

The Minister for Repatriation, Reginald Swartz, replied in the journal three weeks later. He pointed out that doctors, not bureaucrats, decided a veteran's medical status, and that the system was built to 'ensure that no legitimate claim is rejected' and to 'give the claimant the benefit of any doubt'. Kevin Mooney, Chairman of the 6th War Pensions Assessment Appeal Tribunal, was blunter. He called the letter inappropriate and unkind, and suggested that if the doctor felt underpaid for treating ex-servicemen, he could ask to have his name taken off the Repat's list of approved physicians.

That did not settle it. A run of letters followed from doctors in Repatriation hospitals and private practice. One, Robert S. Lawson, complained that veterans were given Commonwealth cars to see specialists on Saturday morning and then found their own way to the football in the afternoon. Another, signing as 'Parkinson's Second Disciple', called the Repat a 'national scandal' for 'contributing large sums to keep a bunch of happy scroungers, unscrupulous rogues and inadequate specimens'.

A group of South Australian doctors went further and wrote directly to the Minister asking for the Repatriation Act to be amended. More than 60 per cent of the doctors at one repatriation hospital signed it. The Repatriation Commission's Chairman, Sir Frederick Chilton, rejected their allegations in what was described as a 'secret letter', and most of the signatories resigned together in 1969.

The novel written from inside a Repat hospital

One of those doctors was John Whiting, a young medical officer at the Repatriation General Hospital at Daw Park in Adelaide. In 1969 he published Be In It, Mate!, a novel about a Dr Andrews working in a Repatriation hospital. Its foreword says that while the characters are fictitious, 'this story is based on fact', and that the author was using it 'to expose the misuse of taxpayers' money'.

When Dr Andrews learns he is being sent to the psychiatric ward, he asks whether they mean 'Malingerer's Mansion'. He later describes his patients to his father like this:

Karageorgos picks out two ideas in that passage that run through the journal letters as well. The first is that war does not really cause mental illness. The second is that whatever is wrong with these men was there before they enlisted, in their heredity or their character.

The whole controversy fed a series of internal investigations into the Repat, ending with the Independent Enquiry into the Repatriation System led by Justice P.B. Toose in 1975.

Where those attitudes came from

Suspicion of the malingering soldier was not new in 1963. Karageorgos traces it in Australia back to the South African War. During the First World War, medical officers were asked for the first time to detect malingerers on the battlefield. Rather than act as police, doctors turned malingering from a crime into a diagnosis, which let them treat it while keeping their 'medical hat on'.

The way Australian doctors did that is the important part. Britain had a hospital for traumatised soldiers as early as 1869, and its Royal Army Medical Corps began invaliding men out with shell shock in 1914. The Australian Imperial Force only started in 1916. Australian medical officers tended to explain breakdown as 'the action of the morally weak', and linked it to heredity and 'social infirmity' rather than to what the soldier had been through.

That carried into the Second World War. In the early 1940s, William S. Dawson, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Sydney, listed 'warning signs' for 'psychopathic types' in the military. They included untidiness, lack of cleanliness, homesickness and being 'indefatigable scribes and diarists'. American psychiatrists of the time mostly put war neurosis down to exhaustion and fatigue. Australian ones were more likely to blame poor social relations and general weakness.

By the 1960s the Repat doctors were mostly treating veterans of the two world wars and Korea, and the same thinking shows up in their letters. In May 1964, a writer signing as 'Parkinson's Apostle' said men on psychiatric entitlements were not mentally ill at all, but 'a group of inadequate individuals who would have broken down under the day-to-day stress of almost any walk of life'.

The idea that war trauma was really about heredity held until 1980. That year, the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) introduced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the first war-related psychiatric diagnosis not tied to heredity. It came largely through pressure from psychiatrists such as Robert Jay Lifton and Chaim Shatan, who were treating Vietnam veterans in the United States.

Why doctors turned on patients they could not cure

Karageorgos uses a framework from the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, who in 1951 described what he called the 'sick role'. In Parsons' model, society accepts someone as genuinely sick when four things are true:

• a doctor confirms they should be excused from their normal responsibilities
• they cannot be expected to get better just by 'pulling themselves together'
• they want to get well
• they seek competent medical help and cooperate with it

The traumatised veteran failed every test in the eyes of the Repat doctors. The doctors could not see a clear physical cause, and they did not have a reliable cure. Psychiatry itself was under attack in the 1960s from anti-psychiatrists like Thomas Szasz, whose 1961 book argued that mental illness was a myth. One historian quoted in the paper says moving between psychiatry and the rest of medicine at the time was like 'interplanetary travel'.

So the frustration of not being able to fix the patient was turned on the patient. C. Gordon Harper, a doctor in Port Macquarie, wrote to the journal in October 1963 that he had seen a repatriation patient cured of anything only once, and that 'it happened only when it dawned on him that his domestic life was becoming endangered by his continual invalidism'. Whiting put it this way in his novel: 'The present system hardly encourages a man to admit improvement, let alone cure, if he thereby suffers a loss of pension.'

Karageorgos compares this to studies of doctors treating alcoholic patients in the same era. Those doctors, too, grew hostile when they could not cure someone. One doctor interviewed in a 1979 study said the patients worth treating were 'anyone who was genuinely ill', then added that he did not count psychiatric patients, because 'I don't really understand psychiatric illness'.

Alcohol treated as a character flaw, not a symptom

The word that comes up again and again in the Repat letters is 'drunk'. The original 1963 letter warned: 'There is a whisper that alcoholism is to be an accepted disability in any psychiatric case. One shudders at the consequences of this.' Parkinson's Apostle wrote that pensions gave veterans 'sufficient money for an escape into alcoholism'.

Heavy drinking alongside war trauma was well known by then. By 1939, 4,891 veterans were being treated for psychiatric conditions in Repatriation hospitals, some specifically for alcoholism. But the Repat doctors read the drinking as proof of bad character, not as part of the illness. In one scene in Be In It, Mate!, a doctor describes a 22-year-old patient who went absent from the hospital, 'got nice and pickled', and lived off his wife's wages and his pension. Asked how many 'real' psychiatric cases were on the ward, the same character says three. 'The rest are the usual Repat collection.'

That framing matters because it is the exact reverse of how alcohol is treated in a DVA claim today. Alcohol use disorder is a recognised condition with its own Statement of Principles (SoP), and it is commonly accepted as a condition flowing from PTSD, depression or another accepted mental health condition. Drinking to cope with what service did to you is evidence of the injury, not evidence against it.

The Royal Commission heard the same thing

The paper's conclusion is the part most relevant to serving members and recent veterans. When the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide was established on 8 July 2021, its roundtables heard about 'under-reporting and hiding of ... mental health issues' because 'medical classification was used as a means of removing people from service'. It described 'a widespread culture of fear' in the ADF about being seen as weak.

The Commission's Interim Report in August 2022 quoted a submission that Karageorgos says could have come straight out of the 1963 letters or Whiting's novel:

Her point is simple. If soldiers today avoid seeking help for fear of being labelled weak, veterans in the 1960s facing doctors who called them 'drunks, bums and no-hopers' almost certainly did the same. The cost in both cases is a missing medical record, and a missing record is what makes a claim hard decades later.

What this means for your claim today

The system you claim under now is very different from the one those doctors were complaining about. DVA decides mental health claims against SoPs, which set out the factors that link a condition to service. PTSD, depression, anxiety disorders and alcohol use disorder each have one. If your service meets a factor in the relevant SoP, the condition can be accepted. Nobody is assessing whether you are of good character or whether you would have broken down anyway.

The record problem the Royal Commission described is still real, though, and it is where we see many mental health claims stall. These are the things that make the difference:

• Get treatment now, even if you have never claimed. Non-Liability Health Care (NLHC) gives anyone with at least one day of continuous full-time service free treatment for any mental health condition, with no claim and no need to prove the condition is linked to service.
• Be honest with your doctor about drinking, sleep and anger. These are often what the SoP factors and the impairment assessment turn on, and leaving them out to look 'better' weakens your claim.
• A missing entry on your service medical file does not end a claim. Your own statement, statements from people you served with, deployment and posting records, and later treatment records can all establish what happened.
• Write down the specific incidents. SoP factors for PTSD and other mental health conditions are tied to particular kinds of experiences, so detail matters far more than general descriptions of stress.
• If you were knocked back in the past, the decision may be worth reviewing. Rules, SoPs and the standard of proof have all changed since many older veterans first tried to claim.

Open Arms provides free and confidential counselling for veterans and families, 24 hours a day, on 1800 011 046. You do not need an accepted claim to use it.

Frequently asked questions

Who were the Repat doctors?

They were doctors employed by or approved by the Repatriation Department, the forerunner of today's Department of Veterans' Affairs. They worked in Repatriation hospitals and in private practice, examining and treating returned servicemen and assessing them for war pensions.

What was Be In It, Mate!?

A 1969 novel by John Whiting, a medical officer at the Repatriation General Hospital at Daw Park in Adelaide. It followed a fictional Repat doctor and presented most psychiatric patients as malingerers and drunks. Whiting said the story was based on fact and wrote it to expose what he saw as waste of taxpayers' money.

When did PTSD become an official diagnosis?

PTSD was introduced in DSM-III in 1980. It was the first war-related psychiatric diagnosis that did not attribute the condition to heredity, and it came largely from work with Vietnam veterans in the United States.

Can I claim alcohol use disorder through DVA?

Yes. Alcohol use disorder has its own SoP and can be accepted either directly from service or as a condition flowing from an accepted mental health condition such as PTSD or depression. It needs a formal diagnosis from a treating clinician.

Do I need a record from my service to make a mental health claim?

No. A contemporaneous record helps, but it is not the only way to show what happened. Personal statements, statements from people you served with, deployment records and later treatment records can all be used to meet the SoP factors.

Can I get mental health treatment from DVA without making a claim?

Yes. Through Non-Liability Health Care, anyone with at least one day of continuous full-time service in the ADF can get treatment for any mental health condition paid for by DVA, without lodging a compensation claim or showing the condition is linked to service.