Irish Examiner View: Mental health review - Still trying to hit 2006 target

Last weekend’s tragic death of television presenter Caroline Flack, 40, is the latest high-profile example of a person overwhelmed by life’s often unfair circumstances, by the world’s relentless intrusion into what should be private,secure space.

The details of Ms Flack’s implosion, and the all-too-human events that led to it, may be particularly hers but her final decision is one all too familiar to too many partners, families, and friends of those swept away by an emotional or mental health crisis.

This reality stands despite a report, released late last year, showing that our suicide rate has fallen to its lowest this century.

Early figures, though they cannot be comprehensive, showed there were 352 suicides in 2018 — 282 male and70 female — or 7.2 per 100,000 of population, according to the National Office for Suicide Prevention.

Suicide is an extreme consequence, an extreme expression of a mental illness, and an emotional crisis too, but there are many, many ways such a vulnerability can play out in a person’s life. Equally, there are many ways society can, through one arm of the health service or another, respond to this need. A Mental Health Commission review — Access to Acute Mental Health Beds in Ireland — has just been published.

It offers a picture of access to acute in-patient services including the number of acute beds related to population, the availability of beds for those over 65, and the availability of continuum-of-care resources. It took the 2006 baselines set out in A Vision for Change, which articulated the direction of our mental health services, as its benchmark.

Its main recommendations have a dispiriting air of familiarity about them: Maintain or restore local acute beds; meet the needs of disparate groups such as older adults; provide beds to support continued care, ie, psychiatric intensive care units, crisis houses, high-support hostels, specialist rehabilitative services.

That this review is still needed 14 years after A Vision for Change was published is a harrowing indictment of this society’s look-the-other-way indifference to how absolutely life-draining a mental illness can be. It’s not as if we can’t afford to resolve this issue so the reason must be something dark, almost beyond our comprehension.