Readers' Blog: Mental health services need change
The essence of two Mental Health Reform surveys published last week exposes high levels of dissatisfaction with current mental health services as provided by the HSE.
Apparently, just 29% of service users said they had a good experience of same.
By any standards of appraisal this is a paltry satisfaction rating, and surely one to be roundly ashamed of . However, while shocking, it is strangely not surprising given the regular adverse commentary and assessment which has been circulating for many years now.
There has been so much written and published re the overriding preponderance of the biomedical management and predominant medication-based response to “life distress” issues, and how wholly inappropriate it is that this over-dominance prevails.
The crucial familial, communal, sociological, and generalised intra-personal dynamics at play in significant individual distress scenarios are core to this, yet non-biomedical approaches to address the are regularly relegated to bit-player roles under
the overarching umbrella of “biomedicalia”.
Having worked in this area for many years, I find it both debilitating and depressing, that the perennial status-quo still broadly prevails, with little or no “vision for change”, ie, real change in wholesome practice.
Thus, people who are struggling and suffering with serious challenges are being short-changed and fundamentally mismanaged, yet the services stubbornly persist in their traditional, distorted vested-interest pharmacological and brain-dysfunction modes of operational response templates. One only hopes that some day the wayward thinking and controlling manipulations of the incumbent overlords can dwindle and fade, allowing some sanity to enter the fray.
