Madam, – In light of the recent Monageer report the following can be looked upon as some of the main reasons why the problems in the report arose and have still to be dealt with.
First, the social, physical and health education (SPHE) class in schools is supposed to deal with mental health issues along with many other crucial issues for our youth today. However, Government policy leaves it up to the individual school to ensure the implementation of this class, meaning there is often a lax approach to it by staff, and this attitude then transcends to the students. Top that off with a lack of resources and teachers who are specifically trained to teach this class and you are left with a disastrous environment to deal with these essential problems.
Second, therapeutic centres for the prevention of suicide and self-harm, such as Pieta House in Lucan, Co Dublin, are few and far between. They rely largely on donations from the public, and yet still receive referrals from HSE hospitals. Such therapeutic centres were highlighted in A Vision for Change (the Department of Health’s mental health policy document) as the appropriate replacement for the old Victorian institutions that had tried to deal with mental ill-health.
However while many of those institutions were sold off, they were not appropriately replaced by what the report suggested, ie a tiered approach to services beginning with "community mental health teams". Instead, the Government pocketed the profit and cut the budget for mental health services in half over the past 10 years. Minister of State, John Moloney, who deals with mental health, has acknowledged that the progress made in implementing A Vision for Changehas been painfully slow.
If we are to move out of the darkness of the Monageer report, and move into the light of a reborn society, where the mentally ill come first, then we must deal with the problems outlined above. – Yours, etc,