Mental health report - Prison is no place for mentally ill

THE scandal of using Irish prisons as ‘psychiatric waiting rooms’ — the equivalent of A&E trolleys in overcrowded hospitals — is a damning indictment of the State’s failure to address the problem of mental illness in society.

The first study of its kind, revealed in today’s Irish Examiner, reveals a major systems breakdown and shows that 60% of female prison inmates and 35% of male inmates have suffered from mental illness at some stage in their lives.

Above all, it highlights the need for Government to divert people with mental health problems into treatment and out of the criminal justice system. And it underlines the urgent need for greatly improved mental health services within the community and in our prisons.

In another glaring illustration of failure to recognise mental illness, the Barr Report last week condemned the garda handling of the siege at Abbeylara. It found the fatal shooting of John Carthy should never have happened and criticised senior officers for not consulting either his psychiatrist, doctor, closest friend, or the Carthy family, though they knew he had a mental illness.

Since that siege six years ago, things may well have improved within the force, as both the Garda Commissioner and the Minister for Justice have claimed. But the force is still in denial about the Abbeylara fallout and the organisation has yet to apologise to the family. As Mr McDowell remarked, the gardaí have a major systemic problem in how they are dealing with the fallout of the siege.

An even bigger systemic problem is exposed in today’s report on the prison system which shows that over one in three female inmates and nearly one in five male inmates suffered from a major depressive order in their lifetime. Some 40% of women and 25% of men had deliberately harmed themselves.

Carried out by leading experts, including the head of the Central Mental Hospital and the clinical director of the State’s National Forensic Mental Health Service, the survey found inmates suffered from disorders involving depression, anxiety, and psychosis.

Mr McDowell is right to root out drugs in prison but the issue goes much deeper. Many psychiatric problems stem from low educational achievement, unemployment, homelessness and a cycle of family disruption and institutionalisation.

While repeated calls have been made to end the inhumane policy of sending people with mental illness to prison, successive governments have turned a blind eye to this situation. As a result, the prison system has tended to become a convenient dumping ground.

Significantly, the report calls for the introduction of diversion schemes to direct mentally ill offenders away from the courts and into treatment instead.

Members of the judiciary have complained over the lack of places for people with psychiatric difficulties, who regularly come before the courts facing criminal charges.

Successive governments have lacked the stomach to acknowledge the scale of mental illness in Ireland.

Frontline institutions of the State, ranging from Government departments to the gardaí, the courts and the prison system, have not come to grips with problems which have been swept under the carpet.

Today’s report turns the spotlight on a dilemma that will continue to bedevil Irish society unless it is addressed in a meaningful way. In particular, there is an onus on politicians to sit up and take notice of the findings of this damning survey.

The Government must have the common sense and political will to address the scandal of putting people with psychiatric problems behind bars.