Sir, – Molly Hennigan draws much-needed attention to the history of Ireland’s “mental hospitals” (“The voices that were physically silenced”, Weekend Review, September 9th).
These institutions, at their peak, housed 20,000 people, more than double the number in reformatory and industrial schools, Magdalene laundries, and mother and baby homes, combined.
Archives suggest that some inpatients were mentally ill, but others were intellectually disabled, traumatised, troubled, homeless, or rejected by their communities.
Add in professionals’ search for prestige, the importance of institutions to local economies, bad laws, and an absence of outpatient support, and Ireland had the highest rate of psychiatric hospitalisation in the world in the 1960s.
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This history is rarely discussed, possibly because the State, rather than the church, ran the asylums.
Today, Ireland has the third lowest number of psychiatric beds per 100,000 population in the EU. The greatest problem now is not over-intrusive care, but access to services.
Even the best efforts of mental health professionals cannot overcome the fact that less than 6 per cent of Ireland’s health budget goes to mental health. Sláintecare recommends 10 per cent.
This deficit is not compensated by other departmental budgets: a study at one psychiatry unit found that almost one-third of inpatients were there not because they were still mentally ill, but because they had unmet accommodation needs or were homeless.
Mental illness is an all-of-society problem, requiring an all-of-government plan and an all-of-society response. – Yours, etc,
BRENDAN KELLY,
Professor of Psychiatry,
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2.