Mental health - Resources needed to fight suicide

THE harrowing words spoken by the father of 28-year-old Sharon Grace, who drowned her daughters before killing herself, go to the heart of an Irish suicide crisis that claims the lives of hundreds of victims every year.

Anyone who has ever lost a loved one through depression or some other psychiatric condition will relate to Eddie Reddy’s sense of hopelessness.

“My Sharon was looking for someone, looking for help, but she couldn’t get it. We will never, ever forget that, for the rest of our lives.”

The bleak question is - how many other people have similarly felt they could not get the help they desperately needed, help that could have saved their lives?

The damning reality of this country’s woefully inadequate mental service is that the number of people trapped in Sharon’s predicament down the years could be counted in hundreds if not thousands.

As Sharon’s father says, whatever improvements have been made in suicide prevention services, they amount to “too little, too late.”

It is shattering to think that she found no help at Wexford’s Ely hospital and left with her children, ending her life and theirs in the cold waters of the Slaney 100 metres away. It is doubtful, however, whether her father’s demand that “someone, somewhere has to answer for that” will ever be realised.

As he spoke, the Samaritans were launching a week-long campaign to target people caring for relatives with mental problems, the silent sufferers of the illness.

Meanwhile, clusters of distressed young people, mostly girls in their late teens and early 20s, are regularly seeking counselling because of domestic violence, bullying, parental separation or difficult relationships. Several have attempted suicide.

Depression now confronts children and adolescents. But the big problem is that in Ireland’s creaking health regime, the mental health service is treated as the Cinderella of the system. As one expert said, there is an urgent need to take a hard look at what is happening in other countries. Basically, the service must be focused more on those who need it, as in Britain.

Since it was set up five years ago, a Government working group on child and adolescent psychiatric services has twice recommended that the number of in-patient beds for children and adolescents be increased dramatically. Ireland has only 20 such beds in two units at Dublin and Galway, whereas seven units with 144 beds are needed countrywide.

Unbelievably, the Health Services Executive cannot say how much of the additional e15 million funding earmarked for mental health will go towards the development of child and adolescent psychiatric services.

Both the Irish College of Psychiatrists and the Psychiatric Association have written to the Government on numerous occasions highlighting the shocking incidence of suicide among young people.

According to reliable estimates, 20% of adolescents suffer psychological disturbance. Yet, Health Minister Mary Harney presides over a system where suicidal teenagers end up in overcrowded A&E units of general hospitals because there are no dedicated beds for them.

Delegates at a Rural Link conference yesterday heard that suicide has reached epidemic proportions. But because of the social stigma, it remains the hidden tragedy of rural Ireland.

In 2003, according to the most up-to-date statistics, a total of 444 Irish people died by their own hand and 58 other fatalities were probably self-motivated.

Year in, year out, more people die from suicide than in the carnage on our roads. If the untimely deaths of Sharon Grace and her two small children are to have any meaning, the Government must plough realistic resources into combating Ireland’s never-ending tragedy of suicide.