Psychiatric assessment delay is cruel, warns expert

IT is cruel, unnecessary and a waste of enormous talent to force young people with mental health problems to wait up to three years for a psychiatric assessment, a conference heard last night.

Head of the National Centre for Youth Mental Health, Dr Tony Bates said young people in Ireland rarely got timely, appropriate and effective help.

New Health Service Executive (HSE) figures reveal more than 3,000 children are waiting for psychiatric assessments.

And it is five years since the Government committed to ensure children would receive quality support and services to promote all aspects of their development as part of the National Children’s Strategy.

Addressing a public forum organised jointly by the centre and the School of Psychology at University College Dublin, Dr Bates said youth mental health was now an issue of significant public concern.

“It affects every family in the country in some way and, as the attendance here tonight attests, there are plenty of votes in youth mental health,” he said.

Prof Pat McGorry, director of the ORYGEN Youth Health, in Melbourne, Australia, said three-quarters of lifetime cases of mental health illness emerged by the age of 24.

He also pointed out that, across Europe, the overall prevalence of mental disorders in adolescence was in the region of 15% to 20%.

And, he warned, the consequences of no treatment or delayed treatment were serious.

“Untreated mental disorder and the late identification of mental illness is a feature of a large proportion of young people who complete suicide,” he said.

The National Centre for Youth Mental Health was recently established to promote the mental health needs of young people.

Dr Bates, former principal clinical psychologist in St James’s Hospital in Dublin, said experts already knew what worked best in treating young people with mental health problems.

“We have to ask why the system is weakest where it needs to be strongest,” he said.

Dr Bates said the centre now want to tackle the issue head on. “We are only talking about this now because it has taken around 100 suicides every year in this age group to bring it to our attention.”

He pointed out that the centre intended producing a new strategy for dealing with youth mental health in September.

“After 28 years working at the coal face of psychiatry, I now have the opportunity to make a difference, not just by writing about what should happen but by making it happen,” he said.