Concern at treatment of mental health

Groups and activists have described the suicide of a 17-year-old boy who had just spent 26 days in a mental-health unit as further evidence of how such services are over-reliant on medication and outdated hospital models.

Dan Hogan, from Donnybrook, Dublin, died in July 2014, having described in his diary how he was “traumatised” by his stay as an involuntary patient at St Joseph’s Adolescent Inpatient Unit in Fairview.

This week, at the inquest into his death, his mother, Elaine Clear, read from his journal: “Hospital was torture and traumatising and was physically, emotionally, and mentally exhausting, like nothing I have experienced before. I felt alone and that no one close to me understood what I was going through”.