Mental health crisis - Vulnerable suffer as row goes on

The delay in establishing promised tribunals to rule on the detention of psychiatric patients against their will has been criticised by former inspectors of mental hospitals.

The Irish Hospital Consultants Association (IHCA) has advised its consultant psychiatrist members not to take part in the system.

Health Minister Mary Harney is blaming the IHCA, which contends the psychiatrists are not adequately resourced. In the circumstances people can hardly be blamed for concluding that the IHCA is prepared to hold psychiatric patients to ransom.

A conference on mental health is expected to be told this week that there is an over-reliance on medication and electro-convulsive treatment to tackle mental health problems, instead of various forms of counselling which are often more effective.

While the minister and the IHCA are busy squabbling over money, there are suggestions that patients are being merely sedated, or given shock treatment, even though more time-consuming treatment would be more effective. The harrowing details of John McCarthy’s story are a grim reminder that patients, who are supposed to come first, are just a secondary consideration, at best.

The most vulnerable people are being sacrificed for other agendas. The politicians, bureaucrats and the ICHA seem to have lost the plot.