Ireland ‘a banana republic for psychiatric services’

IRELAND is a Third World country in terms of its psychiatric services, a leading psychiatrist has claimed.

“Ireland is a banana republic for psychiatric services,” consultant psychiatrist Professor Patricia Casey declared at the weekend.

The professor of psychiatry at the Mater Hospital and University College Dublin said facilities for psychiatric patients were in an appalling state given the country’s wealth.

“There are no proper services for the homeless mentally ill. There are no proper services for people with eating disorders. There are no proper services for people with personality disorders,” she said.

For the few people who could not, in the long term, be cared for at home or treated at home we do not have enough acute psychiatric beds.

And there are inadequate high-support hostels for those who need high levels of support indefinitely.

“I have to keep people for two to three years in an acute ward because they have nowhere else to go,” she said.

Prof Casey, who compiles expert reports for the Government, also said that private patients were just as badly served as public patients.

“I think it is bad across the board. If you are rich, there is still nowhere for you to go if you need long-term (psychiatric) care,” she said.

Fine Gael’s Dan Neville said Prof Casey’s condemnation of the country’s psychiatric services was further proof of the Government’s total neglect of this sector.

The party’s spokesman on health and president of the Irish Association of Suicidology, he said it was more than 20 years since the report on the Mental Health Services Planning for the Future was adopted as Government policy, yet its key recommendation to set up multi-professional teams of service delivery in the psychiatric services and to develop community care had not been delivered.

And, he said the Mental Health Commission had stated that the lack of governance in both management systems and clinical systems within the mental health service was both evident and disturbing.

“We still do not have enough psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, therapists, nurses and back-up staff. We do not intervene early enough to make a real difference,” he said.

And, said Mr Neville said it was a scandal the Government had not tackled the scourge of suicide that continued to claim 500 lives a year.

A spokesman for the Department of Health pointed out that last year €26.2m (including €1.2m for suicide prevention initiatives) was provided for the development of mental health services in line with A Vision for Change, the report of the expert group on Mental Health Policy, bringing the overall spend on mental health services to €984m.

And, he said, a further €25m had been allocated this year to continue this development. He also pointed out that since 1997, the Government had trebled expenditure on mental health from €326m to €984m.