Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Mental Health in Ireland – Demanding Change

 
This week a fourteen year old was admitted to a Waterford adult mental health inpatient unit. Stopping this practice isn’t a luxury item in a recession; it can be a matter of life and death.

As a kid I used to look up to my friend Simon, he was five years older than me, a 14 year old teenager listening to Metallica, popular with girls and banging the door on the way out to house parties. He was exactly everything I thought was cool and what I wanted to become.

But last Friday I attended Simon’s funeral, struggling to fold enough mass booklets in time as devastated mourners overflowed the church.  Simon had  experienced mental health problems, most notably schizophrenia, and took his life on the banks of the River Dodder.

His battle with mental illness lasted 14 years, it was valiant and inspirational. He wasn’t just fighting to recover, he had dreams and goals he wanted to achieve and he was going to accomplish them with or without his illness. But he couldn’t get better in Ireland, life in a mental health unit had no meaning for him, he wanted to work and feel empowered. But in Ireland, despite the boom years, we did not invest in sufficient holistic community-based facilities and Simon went abroad for treatment.

After spending time in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin with its excellent staff his mother managed to get a visa for him to travel to Gould Farm in Berkshire County, western Massachusetts. Gould Farm is a residential therapeutic community, dedicated to helping adults with mental health problems move towards recovery, health and independence through community living, meaningful work, and modern clinical support. It’s here that Simon said he had the best years of his life; Gould Farm empowered him and provided a community environment. One day his friend asked him what he wanted to do with his life, the answer was scuba diving, and the photo on his coffin was of him diving off the coast of Massachusetts. He was living life and enjoying it. However, Simon’s visa did not allow him to work for money in the USA, so he returned to Ireland to try and find a meaningful job and begin a new happy life at home. Tragically he could find no work in the recession, was admitted a mental health unit, stopped taking his medication and didn’t survive.

If there was a Gould Farm in Ireland, chances are that Simon would still with us. If we are serious about treating mental health then more funds must be made available for this kind of facility in Ireland.  It’s good news the Minister of State for Mental Health John Moloney has identified this as a problem and said the budget must increase, but just this week it was reported that at least 100 children under the age of 18 have been admitted to adult psychiatric facilities this year despite a commitment by the HSE to phase out the practice.

We need to see change, end discrimination against people with mental health problems and demand that our mental health services are given the funding and facilities they desperately need. Because as we see from Simon’s story, it is a matter of life and death.

 
 

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