Psychiatric chaos - We’ve got our priorities all wrong

IN the space of 24 hours we have been told that the State’s attempt to rescue Anglo Irish Bank’s bondholders will cost at least €24,000,000,000 – €24 billion may be easier to read but it remains equally incomprehensible – and that gardaí in riot gear have been used to restore order on psychiatric wards because there are no longer enough nurses to meet the needs of the day.

Is there a more vivid illustration of how this society has utterly lost its way? Is there a more chilling example of how we have become subservient to objectives diametrically opposed to the responsibility and compassion the great majority of us feel towards the ill, the weak, the unemployed, the impoverished and the marginalised?

Taoiseach Brian Cowen has told us that he will do “whatever it takes” to rescue the banks, but now that it is becoming clearer what “whatever it takes” actually means, and the unimaginable sums involved, maybe it’s time to pause and ask ourselves who we feel the greatest obligation to – our troubled neighbours and relatives, or the faceless high-rollers reckless enough to bankroll Sean FitzPatrick’s €24bn catastrophe.

Yesterday the Psychiatric Nurses’ Association (PNA) pointed out mental health services now receive the lowest ever allocation as a percentage of the health budget.

How can this be true? How can any Government backbencher – no matter how browbeaten by the system or the party whip – sleep realising that this is the situation they are responsible for? If they can’t fix this what are they for? What use are they?

The politicians responsible for this outrage may be aware that our suicide levels are frightening and that there is something approaching an epidemic of depression sweeping the country. Soaring unemployment and a growing, deeply worrying mortgage crisis are unlikely to change that situation any time soon.

The PNA also say that 20% of psychiatric nurses left the HSE in the last two years – 596 last year alone – and that up to 250 more will retire this year.

Because of the shortage of nurses, the union tells us, and the threat posed by violent patients, security companies have been employed to provide secure “care”. How can we tolerate private-sector heavies being used to replace nurses in our psychiatric wards?

These are extraordinary times requiring extraordinary measures, but that does not extend to treating our psychiatric patients like so many cattle being loaded on a ship for export.

The unease caused by the consequences of bailing out the banks – the mistreatment of psychiatric patients is just one of many, many examples – is so great that Brian Cowen’s Government cannot continue along this path without seeking a mandate to do so.

The usual blather about having a mandate to rule for five years no longer holds water. It was nullified the moment it became clear that absolutely unprecedented measures would be needed to try to undo the situation those very politicians did so much to create.

It’s time for an election; it’s time to decide if we live in a banking system with a society attached or a society with a banking system serving our needs.

We cannot continue to throw money into a bottomless pit without any guarantee of success, it is simply bad business. And, as the PNA pointed out yesterday, the consequences of doing so are shaming and immoral.