Sarah Harte: Mental health is still stigmatised in Ireland — we need to normalise it

An overarching question is whether we have any coherent, long-term strategy in place to reform mental health services, writes Sarah Harte

In the wake of a Mental Health Commission report, a pressing question is whether we are reinstitutionalising mentally ill or vulnerable people who don’t meet societal expectations, reverting to a debunked model of providing psychiatric services through centralised long-stay mental health care.

Historically, we locked people up in this country for all sorts of reasons, many of them spurious. At one point during the 1950s our ‘inpatient’ admission rates for so-called mental health problems were so high we outstripped the Soviet Union for detaining people, followed by the US.

Coercive confinement became a socially expedient way of ‘disposing’ of people who were perceived to have transgressed in some way or quite simply whose families wanted them out of the way. It was a backdoor way of managing social problems with ‘asylums’ often acting as repositories for ‘problem’ people.