Mental healthcare: it’s time to act
The plan is stunning in its simple good sense. “Services need to be user focused; needs of carers also should be fully recognised; mental health services need to be community-based, providing a range of specialised, though closely integrated, multi-disciplinary community mental health teams. Mental health services today are unsatisfactorily financed, receiving less than 7% of the health care budget. It is acknowledged that 20%-30% of all health disability is related to mental health problems.”
The trouble is that such sense seems likely to be novel to those who administer mental health services in the state and to some of the professionals who work in them.
It is the experience of many users of mental health services that their human rights as established in international and domestic law are ignored. They find themselves involuntarily detained in hospitals without any easily available right to challenge that detention (The mental health tribunals established under the Mental Health Act 2001 have yet to be appointed).
Patients find themselves subjected to treatment (including ECT which irreversibly alters the physiology of the brain) to which neither they nor their next of kin have the right to refuse consent. They are often treated in appalling conditions in outdated and poorly-maintained hospitals.
It is frightening to say, but the strategic plan will be worth less than the (glossy) paper on which it is written unless the Minster for Health, minister of State at the Department of Health and Children with responsibility for mental health, chief executives and programme managers of health boards, and some members of the mental health professions, open their minds to the reality that our services are failing desperately and require wholesale reform.
Yet another report will be generated by the department’s expert group on mental health in the year ahead. Unfortunately, reports and plans are not what we need.
All say much the same thing. The system is not working, it requires massive change, multi-disciplinary teams are the way forward, and care for those with poor mental health is most effective when delivered in their communities.
So, well done to Dr Owens. The plan he has written is excellent, reflecting the reality of the services and the immediate need for improvement. I only hope ‘they’ will listen to him.
The weight of evidence supporting Dr Owens’ propositions is overwhelming. It’s time to quit stalling and start to deliver the services which people with poor mental health have a legal and moral right to expect.
Kevin McPartlan,
Chairman,
Cork Advocacy Network,
Bowling Green,
Mallow,
Co Cork.
