Woman wrote to minister and HSE over detention

An 18-year-old woman with a personality disorder has written a letter to the minister for health and a poignant poem to the HSE appealing for her return to Ireland after 19 months detention in a secure psychiatric hospital in the UK.

The woman has spent almost all of the past four years, since aged 14, in psychiatric facilities here and the UK with little improvement in her condition but the HSE wants an order continuing her detention in the UK because it believes she is a high suicide risk and is safest there, the High Court heard.

The woman’s situation raises serious and what her counsel described as “profound” issues under the Constitution and European Convention on Human Rights concerning the High Court’s powers to make orders for the involuntary detention of adults with personality disorders when the Mental Health Acts excludes such detention for adults with personality disorders.