“We’re going to have more suicides.”
Siobhan Murray works for Dublin Counsellors. She and her colleague Lynn Agnew provide reduced rates for counselling for students and free mental health talks in schools because they know that young people are struggling.
I asked her about the consequences of removing money from our mental health budget, and her answer was painfully clear.
“The big thing that we find is people start to feel like they are the only people this is affecting, that mental health is affecting, because people aren’t talking about it and the support isn’t there,” she says.
“Whereas if the funding is there… people can talk about it and realise they’re not alone.”
People certainly aren’t alone in having a mental health issue in Ireland. According to Mental Health Reform, 1 in 4 people will suffer from a mental health issue in their lifetime, including depression, anxiety, psychosis and self-harm.
But it appears to be even more common than that for young people. A recent study by ReachOut found that 63% of students said their lecture attendance was affected by mental ill-health. Other research by USI found that 36% of students feel down every day, and a further 35.7% feel down every week.
Treatments such as talk therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy and certain medications can be used effectively to mitigate symptoms and to help people get on top of their mental health. However, the services just aren’t there if you don’t have the money to go into the private system.
Siobhan says, “The public mental health services aren’t catching people in time.”
Recently it was discovered that €12m of the €35m earmarked for hiring new staff for mental health services was going to be diverted to “more politically sensitive areas.”
Brian Higgins, CEO of Pieta House, argues that removing that money from the mental health system would be “disastrous”.
“I think peoples’ lives are way too important to play politics with.”
Ireland has the fourth highest suicide rate in Europe, and it is the leading cause of death for young people in this country. Last year, more than 500 people took their own lives. That’s 500 families who lost someone. The tragedy is that these deaths were completely preventable.
Our mental health budget makes up only 6% of our health budget. The fact that it wasn’t perceived to be ‘politically sensitive’ and therefore necessary is emblematic of our politicians’ attitude to mental health.
For every person who doesn’t take their life, despite thinking of it in their lowest moments, there is someone whose life is falling by the wayside, little by little. Their work and studies suffer, sometimes to the point of not being sustainable anymore. They cut themselves off from the people around them. Everything becomes harder, even just getting up in the morning.
It’s hard to experience, and it’s hard to watch.
This Government, which supposedly cares so much about investing in our young people, in talent and the knowledge economy, continues to be wilfully negligent when it comes to mental health.
When RTE decided to put in a section about mental health during the leaders’ debate after public pressure, none of the candidates had anything but empty platitudes to offer.
We have an enormous public health crisis, and our most senior politicians couldn’t even be bothered to learn more about the situation, let alone fund the solution. Not only is this short-sighted, it’s recklessly endangering the lives of so many.
As Niall Breslin said in his speech to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health and Children:
“The reality is that our youth, the future of this country, need urgent help. They are exposed to too much, so much is expected of them and both the external and internal pressures they are being asked to cope with are simply not viable.
“The result is the great epidemic of their generation – agonising suicide rates, disturbingly high anxiety and depression rates, self-harm, eating disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, and so on. We simply cannot ignore this anymore.”
Lizzie O’Malley is a journalist who will be joining the JOE.ie team in the coming weeks.
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