Ireland has only a fifth of specialist teams needed to work with people who have psychosis, doctor says

Daniela Ferro, a German woman living in Ireland for over 15 years, was just 18 she experienced a psychotic episode in Germany. She waited just 24 hours for admission to hospital there. Photo: Izaak Ferro

There are just five specialist teams working with people who have psychosis but the country needs as many as 20 more, according to Dr Karen O’Connor who is national clinical lead for early intervention in psychosis.

Dr O’Connor highlighted critical gaps despite progress since a model of care was published in 2019. 

“You’re ideally wanting to see people within four weeks of onset of the symptoms,” she said. “We know that in 2016 it was about 20 weeks then.” 

She said it is now down to six-and-a-half weeks nationally and in Cork it’s down to three-and-a-half weeks. "It is really good, but it’s just about trying to expand it now.” Data is not collected for counties without teams.

“We need probably another 20 to cover the whole country, we’d like to have about 25 across the whole country so no matter where you were, you’d get access to one of these teams,” she said.

“Now it just depends on where you live whether you can access one or whether you can’t. It’s good that we’re growing, 10 years ago these teams weren’t here.” 

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Dr O’Connor, a psychiatrist working in Cork, also said staffing is an issue, especially getting cover for maternity leave absences. Similar frustrations were identified in the Psychosis Survey 2024 published by Shine, the HSE and Mental Health Reform earlier this month.

When Daniela Ferro was just 18 she experienced a psychotic episode at home in Germany. In contrast to what she dismisses as the “Hollywood view” of this condition, she said: “I felt afraid of the whole world rather than the world being afraid of me.” 

At the height of her crisis, she said: “I had lots of audio and visual hallucinations. One of them was when I went into my mother’s bedroom, I looked at her and saw a different person.” 

She described feeling “so scared”, saying she thought: "There was a witch flying by the window and I heard voices in my head.” 

Having lived in Ireland for 15 years, she advocates for faster access to treatment here. She waited just 24 hours for admission to hospital in Germany. 

She said:

If I hadn’t had treatment so quickly, where would I be now? I wonder would I be in a so-called normal life, have a career and a family and all of that?

Minister of state for mental health, Mary Butler, said funding was allocated in Budget 2025 for two new teams in Limerick and Dublin.

Psychosis affects how the brain processes information so a person might see, hear or believe things that are not real. It can be linked to trauma, illegal drug use - including cannabis - or prolonged sleep-deprivation, among other issues. 

It often starts in a person's late teens or early 20s but can also affect pregnant women and other groups.