Mental health system ‘needs a wake-up call’

THE Irish mental health service is closed and complacent and in dire need of a wake-up call, a major conference on mental health heard yesterday.

The service was categorised as antiquated and far too dependant on medical and hospital intervention by a number of speakers at the International Conference on Mental Health held at University College Cork.

Delegates heard the chairman of the Mental Health Commission, Dr John Owens, castigate the traditional approach to mental health which relied far too much on purely medical responses and hospitalisation.

“It is far too bed-based,” he said, adding that many carers felt burnt-out by lack of facilities and estranged from a system they were forced to operate.

He also advocated listening more to users of the system and taking on board their views in the formulation of policy. Dr Owens said his commission was working on a report, due out later this year, which would help to bring about a radical change in the mental health service.

However, the reality of the mental health service was brought into focus by the testimony of Diarmuid Ring and John McCarthy, two users of a system they encountered as brutish, uncaring and unresponsive.

Describing himself as a victim of the system, Mr McCarthy, a senior member of the Cork Advocacy Network that hosted the conference, said it was time the users of the system became central to changing it.

“If we don’t take on the responsibility of changing it we have no business asking someone else to do it,” he told delegates to the conference which was held in conjunction with the Department of Applied Social Studies in UCC.

Mr McCarthy’s passionate, angry and, at times, hilarious account of his encounters with the system brought delegates to their feet.

“Before anyone puts on a white coat and gives me an injection let me say that I am angry but not aggressive,” he said, to rapturous applause from a packed auditorium at UCC.

“I am living with the normality of madness and I am proud of it,” he added, advocating health professionals to listen to patients and stop patronising them.

“Don’t confuse understanding with pity. A plea for one does not mean a plea for the other. I don’t need your pity but I do need your understanding.”

Mr McCarthy said that he was sick of being asked about his experiences with the mental health service and offered instead his expertise. “It is time to shout stop,” he said. “Stop pandering to us, stop insulting us and stop doing what you are doing.”

He also derided what he described as “political correctness bullshit” that demanded that mental health patients be described as ‘clients’. “I would prefer to be called a nutter,” he said.

He also gave a moving account of a man whose sister spent 62 years locked up in an institution from the age of 17 and described the horror of recently seeing the body of a friend propped up with a roll of toilet paper in St Patrick’s Hospital, Sarsfield’s Court, in Cork.