Tackling suicide

IN his article entitled ‘Tackling suicide depends on State’s financial wellbeing’ (Irish Examiner, June 16), John Breslin quotes Junior Minister Tim O’Malley’s response to a previous report on the high number of suicides and attempted suicides...

"With the reduction in psychiatric hospital bed numbers, it is to be expected that expenditure relative to other services would fall."

I cannot see the logic of this statement. I understood that the 1984 white paper 'Planning for the Future' was about replacing hospital care with community care and support by redirecting funds and even, I dared to hope, increasing them.

Instead we lost many psychiatric beds and little to replace them.

Small wonder that three out of four admissions are readmissions that over 50% of homeless people have a history of mental illness and that our rate of long-stay patients is more than double that of anywhere else in the developed world or that Ireland is in violation of international law in its treatment of the mentally ill?

Hello. Anyone out there?

Joan Hamilton,

Dromina,

Charleville,

Co Cork.