Amnesty report - A bias that should not be tolerated

ANYONE who has been a victim of discrimination of any kind — racial, religious, gender or sexual or even cultural — will have brushed against one of the darker aspects of humanity.

People who are condemned because of who they are, where they come from or how they look or whatever illnesses befall them, face challenges those of us who imagine ourselves normal would find utterly unacceptable.

Yesterday Amnesty International Ireland reported that as many as 95% of people who have suffered mental health issues believe they have been discriminated against because of their condition.

Though this is shocking and reveals another disappointing truth about the Irish, it cannot be surprising.

We celebrate someone who has beaten cancer or a dodgy hip, we even celebrate someone who has lost weight, but if someone is unfortunate enough to suffer a mental illness then there seems to be the possibility that they face a life-long stigma even if they make a full recovery.

After all this is a society where, despite what seemed the best of intentions, psychiatric services are run down to a point where the Inspector of Mental Health Services has condemned facility after facility as being unfit for human use.

It can hardly be surprising in a society where, because of nursing shortages and recruitment embargoes, gardaí in riot gear have been used to restore order in psychiatric wards.

This can hardly be surprising in a country where the ambitions expressed in 2006 in A Vision for Change, which would have done little more than made our system comparable with standards commonplace throughout Europe, were so easily put to one side long before our economic collapse made such modest ambition untenable.

Government felt able to do this because they knew that the number of people affected was small and that the ensuing outcry would be manageable.With this track record can we be surprised that someone who suffers from depression finds doors they imagined open closed in their face?

This discrimination, mostly unseen, unspoken and more often than not just inferred, must contribute significantly to Ireland’s suicide epidemic.

Why wouldn’t it? All of a sudden you become ill and though family and close friends may be supportive those relationships we all depend on to make our lives work smoothly even if at one step removed — neighbours, work colleagues, friends of friends, team-mates and maybe even old school pals — change their attitudes to you then you’re in a different place.

As we begin to re-imagine how we might rebuild this country we need to look at why it is possible for someone who goes through our state and family educational systems, why someone who absorbs the social and religious mores we hold so dear can adopt such inhuman and unchristian attitudes.

Why is it that something none of us would dare condone in public or tolerate if it was applied to ourselves is as prevalent as Amnesty have pointed out?