UP to 30 people a year commit suicide while they are in psychiatric hospitals or shortly after they are discharged, the Inspector of Mental Hospitals said yesterday.
Dr Dermot Walsh said that he expected the recently established Working Party on Suicide to recommend a "confidential inquiry system" to look into such cases.
Dr Walsh was speaking in the aftermath of this week's High Court judgment in which the North Western Health Board was found to have been negligent in discharging Mr Eamonn Healy from St Columba's Hospital, Sligo. He committed suicide four days later.
The health board was still not commenting of the case yesterday, saying that it could not do so "until it received the judgment of the court and gave full consideration to it in consultation with its legal advisers".
A solicitor for Mr Healy's family said that the judgment effectively amounted to "a damning indictment of the manner of operation of the system of assessment in operation at the hospital as regards the discharge of patients".
Dr Walsh, who was speaking on RTE, refused to comment on the case of Katherine Dwyer, which had been highlighted by The Irish Times and by RTE.
Ms Dwyer, who had been an outpatient of St Loman's Hospital, killed her father last December, spent two brief periods in the hospital and then killed herself on January 5th.
Dr Walsh, who is clinical director of St Loman's, said that he could not comment on the case as the inquest had not yet been held. He told RTE that the causes of suicide were deeply rooted in society.
Ms Betty Whelan, of Recovery, a self help organisation which works mainly with people who have been, or are, psychiatric patients, said that follow up services were the crucial issue for people discharged from hospital.
Depression, she said, was "very isolating" and, on leaving hospital, patients should be introduced to self help groups and follow up services.
It was important not to react to the recent tragedies by seeing the psychiatric ward as the primary place in which the problems of people with depression or suicidal tendencies could be solved, said Dr Bartley Sheehan, the Dublin County Coroner.
Where depression was caused by real circumstances, the best support which could be given would he to help people to deal with these circumstances, he added.