Like many people, Joel Cauchi first experienced mental health problems as a teenager. He has been remembered as a normal-enough kid, in turn-of-the-century Toowoomba, if a little socially awkward.
“This is so horrendous that I can’t even explain it,” Cauchi’s father Andrew said on Monday, as he reluctantly fielded questions from the media in Toowoomba.In a frank and wide-ranging exchange, an at-times distraught Andrew Cauchi suggested his son’s decline started when he stopped taking his prescribed psychotropic medication and moved to the city.
By the time he was in his mid-30s, when his former school friends had families, Cauchi had moved away from home. Michele Cauchi said her son, no longer feeling the negative effects of medication, “wanted to have a life”. But he also left his psychiatrist behind, and she concedes she was worried. Queensland acting Assistant Commissioner Roger Lowe said the majority of contact police had with Cauchi had been since 2000, when it appeared his mental health started to decline. But nothing was so serious as to warrant charges or ongoing monitoring.“They go about their days without causing these types of crimes. Mental health in society is not a crime.