Tommy Tiernan Show recap: Prof Brendan Kelly on Ireland’s ‘epidemic of mental hospitals’
Professor of Psychiatry Brendan Kelly on the Tommy Tiernan Show
Snooker player Stephen Hendry spoke on Saturday night’s Tommy Tiernan Show about his career as a world champion snooker player and the pressures of fame.
He became a professional player at 16 and took his talent for granted, saying it was “difficult to keep the enthusiasm” for long hours of practise as he got older.
“Through the 90s, I was expected to win. I won five world championships in a row and I just took it for granted I was going to win. And when then all of a sudden you're in a situation where you take it for granted you’re going to lose. It’s all about confidence and losing that invincibility that you have.”
Hendry, who is divorced and a father of two, said he regrets sacrificing time with his family for his snooker career.
“Family and relationships can be difficult and can be sacrificed because I was all about being the best at snooker and snooker was all that mattered. That makes you a very selfish person.
“I think it takes that special kind of selfish person to get to the top in an individual sport. You look at most top sportsmen who dominated sports and most of them are divorced or have been divorced.”
‘There’s casualties in terms of getting to be the best.’
— RTÉ One (@RTEOne) April 13, 2024
Stephen Hendry tells Tommy that in order to be top of your game in individual sport you can become a selfish person #TommyTiernanShow@tommedian @SHendry775 pic.twitter.com/YOkJsk5boG
Tiernan was also joined by psychiatrist Prof Brendan Kelly, who spoke about the complex history of mental hospitals in Ireland as well as our current relationship with mental health.
Kelly said he predicts a reckoning with Ireland's mental health history and the country's tendency to rely on institutional responses to social problems.
“I suppose in my area, the mental hospitals as they were called, or asylums, as they were called, very much demonstrate how we tend to fall back on the institution — the building, the structure, the routine — when we're faced with a social problem,” he said.
Those hospitals began with “good intentions” he believes but they became overcrowded and out of control.
Professor Brendan Kelly tells Tommy about the enormous number of often forgotten people in mental hospitals in Ireland in the past#TommyTiernanShow @tommedian pic.twitter.com/v0AF7OIoDO
— RTÉ One (@RTEOne) April 13, 2024
“We never had an epidemic of mental illness we had an epidemic of mental hospitals,” Kelly said, highlighting how doctors were paid more if they had higher numbers of patients in the hospitals.
At one point, 20,000 people were in mental hospitals, twice the amount that were in Magdalene laundries, mother and baby homes, prisons, orphanages and industrial schools combined at the same time.
Today, Kelly believes more needs to be done to care for people with mental illness.
“Ireland today has the third lowest number of psychiatric inpatient beds in the EU — a very dramatic swinging of the pendulum.”
Finally, poet Paula Meehan reflected on intergenerational trauma and the therapeutic role of poetry in her own life.
Meehan detailed her family’s history in Dublin, including her great-grandmother's role in ending brothel culture in the Monto.
“Anna Meehan, my great grandmother, was the last of the Dublin madams. She negotiated the end of brothel culture in the Monto. It was the biggest red light district in Europe in its day.”
She said the impact is “to this day reverberating in the indigenous community” through the local economy and addiction in the area.
She said her early poetry was “revenge-driven” but has “been salvific for me”.
