Minister seeks €4m in Budget 2025 to expand counselling service for adults

Mary Butler wants to expand the Counselling in Primary Care Service to all of those who have a doctor-only medical card in a specific effort to tackle male suicide. File photo: Gerard McCarthy

A €4 million expansion of a counselling programme to help curb male suicide numbers is being targeted in the Budget.

Minister for mental health Mary Butler is seeking funding in the Budget to expand the HSE's NCS Counselling in Primary Care Service (CIPC), which provides time-limited counselling to adults.

The service is available to those over 18 who are medical card holders and experiencing mild to moderate psychological and emotional difficulties such as depression, anxiety, panic reactions, relationship problems, loss issues, and stress.

CIPC provides up to eight counselling sessions with a professionally qualified and accredited counsellor or therapist and operates from more than 240 locations across Ireland.

Ms Butler wants to expand the scheme to all of those who have a doctor-only medical card, which would come at a cost of €4 million, in a specific effort to tackle male suicide.

A national evaluation of the CIPC was carried out by the HSE National Counselling Service and found that its counselling is "highly effective" and "makes a real difference to people’s lives".

According to that review, prior to counselling, 26.7% of those who availed were identified as displaying self-harm or suicide risk indicators. This reduced significantly with counselling intervention, with post-counselling scores indicating a reduction to 8.5% — a clinically and statistically significant improvement.

However, the review said there was a "need to secure equity of access primarily through expansion of the service beyond medical card holders".

The report reads: "In summary, these findings tell us counselling is very effective. Most clients who availed of counselling with CIPC experienced improvement in both mental and physical health, their mental well-being improved, they felt less distressed and were able to return to their day-to-day activities. 

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"Given the prevalence of common mental health disorders, their impact on physical health, social relationships and general functioning as well as the psychological, societal and economic cost of such common mental health disorder, the potential for CIPC to positively impact the mental and physical health of the Irish population is evidenced in the findings of this report."

There were 504 deaths from suicide in Ireland in 2020, according to the latest Central Statistics Office data. Of those 72.6% were men. The proportion of deaths among women has also been increasing over the last decade.

Seven in 10 deaths were attributed to those aged 35 years and over. The age group with the highest proportion was 40 to 44. Nearly 10% of suicides in 2020 were aged 65 and older.