Psychiatrist breaks down after Bondi attack backflip

A former psychiatrist of the Bondi Junction shopping centre attacker has broken down in court after withdrawing her previous claim the violence was spurred on by sexual frustration.

Joel Cauchi, 40, had armed himself with a knife when he fatally stabbed six shoppers at Sydney's Westfield Bondi Junction and injured 10 others in April 2024.

The Queensland psychiatrist who treated Cauchi for eight years on Wednesday backtracked on evidence that Cauchi's motivation might have been due to "frustration, sexual frustration, pornography and hatred towards women".

"It was a conjecture on my part and I should not have said what I said," she told the NSW Coroners Court.

"And do you withdraw it?" asked barrister Sue Chrysanthou SC. representing the families of three of Cauchi's victims Ashlee Good, Jade Young and Dawn Singleton.

"Yes," the doctor replied.

Expert evidence provided to the inquest says Cauchi was "floridly psychotic" during the attack.

The officer-in-charge of the police investigation also previously told the coroner that there was no suggestion he had targeted women during the stabbing spree.

Diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teen, Cauchi had been successfully treated since 2001.

But when he shifted from the public to the private system in 2012, he formed a plan with the psychiatrist - who cannot be legally identified - to gradually decrease his dosage.

By mid-2019, he was completely off the two antipsychotics he was taking.

He became detached from the mental health system entirely in early 2020 after moving to Brisbane at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The psychiatrist on Wednesday apologised for "being short" with counsel assisting Peggy Dwyer SC during previous questioning.

But she quickly became frustrated by Ms Chrysanthou's grilling, saying the barrister "did not have a degree in medicine" during a barrage of questions about blood tests and levels of antipsychotics.

"I have to educate you," she said when asked whether an early warning sign of relapse was a sign of psychosis.

"I don't want to be educated," Ms Chrysanthou replied.

The pressure of one-and-a-half days of intense questioning, by different lawyers including her own, was apparent by Wednesday afternoon when the psychiatrist was seen in tears in the witness box, holding tissue-filled hands to her face.

She earlier denied a connection between Cauchi being taken off antipsychotic drugs and months later developing an obsession with pornography and sex.

She also dismissed his wanting to take HIV anti-viral drugs after a single visit to a brothel as a sign of paranoia.

Excessive notes left around his house could have been because his obsession with sex and pornography left him in torment from the "religious alien or the Christian alien," she told the court.

The doctor also defended her initial assessment of Cauchi in 2012 as having first-episode schizophrenia, despite him exhibiting symptoms in 2001, 2002 and 2008.

The diagnosis was not passed on to Cauchi's general practitioner.

Despite around 130 consultations with herself, mental health nurses and other psychiatrists from 2015 to 2020 at the clinic, Cauchi had not shown any signs of psychosis, she said.

She testified that she never thought his insight was impaired enough to compel him to take antipsychotics.

It was "very unfortunate" that neither Cauchi nor his family reconnected with the private clinic to organise further counselling sessions after March 2020, she told the court.

The five-week inquest, probing Cauchi's mental health care as well as emergency services' responses to the attack, continues.

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