Madam, – The recent findings of the State’s mental health inspectors’ show that some of the psychiatric hospitals where the most vulnerable individuals in our society are cared for, are “unfit for human habitation” (Home News, December 28th).
These revelations violate most people’s sense of social justice. In essence the report describes human zoos: poor ventilation, cramped dormitories, the presence of dirt and malodorous smells, poor sanitation, broken furniture, aimless wanderings of patients, the absence of constructive daily activity, and in the Mater Hospital’s acute psychiatric unit in Dublin, the failure to comply with the rules over the use of electroconvulsive therapy, mechanical restraint and seclusion.
How can this state of affairs be so? How can we understand such dehumanising “appalling conditions’’ in a democratic society? We can point to the collective culture of silence of those responsible for the daily delivery of mental health care services, the doctors, nurses, psychologists, occupational therapists who have full knowledge of these subhuman standards.
Also to the absence of the voices of relatives, and obvious lack of State funding and so on.
I believe there are deeper issues at play here, namely the absence of solidarity with and compassion for the mentally unwell. It’s one thing to call ourselves human beings, but that implies a certain evolution of interconnected awareness which in this case we do not seem to be displaying. Are we deluding ourselves that we possess the capacity for human sustainability? Notwithstanding our behaviour towards mother earth.
How we continue to treat the most vulnerable in our society is the true barometer of the institutional abuse so currently prevalent and our comfortability with its continuance.
The urgent reformation of our psychiatric services cannot rest solely on funding, will and action, but must be fuelled by the essential human drives of mutual respect, solidarity, and compassionate caring. We all need to look into our own hearts and identify with the patients and environments described by the inspectors.
Lest we forget, nobody is immune from psychological distress and emotional turmoil.
In the words of Martin Luther King, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter” . – Yours, etc,