Ms Louise Walsh:

I have three boys. We had no problems. I had three perfectly normal kids who were very intelligent, high achievers and very good in school. One of them won the south-east maths challenge. He is very brainy. The other guy was awarded for his abilities in Irish. I never had any bother with my kids. I want to show the committee a photo of them. They are brazen, good kids. They play hurling. One is a boxer and the other fellow does MMA. We are just a normal family. I did not have any of the problems that the girls have had, thank God. Then, in October 2015 my partner died suddenly of a heart attack. Our world was rocked. It was swept from under our feet. I had been a special needs assistant for almost eight years. I had been made redundant and in the meantime I got a job working in Revenue. I was due to start in Revenue the week after my partner died, but I had to postpone it.

I started after two weeks. My kids were back in school. We had to rebuild our lives after my partner died. I wanted to try to get a normal life back so that they had a good foundation in everything. I went to work and we did our best to get by. In January I found out my eldest son who was in fifth year had been going to school but he had been coming home every day about 11 a.m. or 11.30 a.m. and getting into bed. He could not cope with life. He could not cope with school. He was suffering with severe depression brought on by grief after losing his dad. I took some time off work and brought him to the doctor. The doctor rang the nurses 24-hour suicide helpline but he was too young to be helped. He was just after turning 17 so he was not eligible for the service. The doctor said that he should do exercise, do everything. We followed all the advice. He played sport and we did everything but it was not working so we went back to the doctor and the doctor and I begged him to please present himself in accident and emergency as he was suicidal. He wanted to die as he could not go on. We told him that the only way to get access to the services was to go to accident and emergency because there was a ten to 12 week waiting list for CAMHS and he just could not wait. We went three times to accident and emergency. He was put on Prozac and quetiapine, an anti-psychotic drug. He was 17 years of age and he was put on drugs that have warnings on them that children should not be on them as they increase the risk of suicide. He was put on those drugs and we were sent home. Things went from bad to worse. I could not go back to work. I had to take time off work. My other two children were watching that. They were 13 and 14 at the time. They had just lost their father and they were at risk of losing their eldest brother at this stage as well. That was the reality. We had a double grave and there was a good chance we were going to use it in six months.

The fourth time my son had gone out, he had about five pints. It was March. He was 17 and he had a few drinks. He came home and he was as happy as Larry. He got a Chinese takeaway. That night everything fell apart for him. He told me he had a noose in the shed and he had tried to hang himself a couple of times. That night he said he could not take it anymore and he begged me to let him die. He pointed to a guy on the street who had alcohol issues and he said to please let him die as that was all he had ahead of him. He said he had nothing ahead of him only to be a drug addict or an alcoholic. He said if I loved him I would let him die. I rang the Garda and I rang an ambulance that night. The Garda came after about half an hour and my two sons were out on the road watching for the Garda to show them where we lived. I was physically restraining a 17-year old boy. My brother and my father had come to the house at this stage to try to help me. He had broken up the bathroom. He had put his head through his bedroom wall. He was trying everything to get the pain out of his head and nothing would work. He said he had done everything I had asked him and everything the doctors had asked but nobody could help him. He said he just needed to die. He said I would get on way better and the lads would be way better if he was not in our lives. He said we would soon realise that the best thing for this family was for him to die.

When the gardaí arrived at the house I was physically restraining him on the couch in the sitting room because he was trying to get out to the shed and he was trying to get access to a knife in the kitchen. I had my arms wrapped around him trying to hold him, trying to stop him killing himself. The gardaí came. They asked what I wanted them to do about it. I said I wanted them to help me save my son's life. I said I called them to help me save my son's life, that I could not do it on my own. I asked where the ambulance was. They said there was no ambulance coming for him. They asked what I wanted an ambulance for and that they would bring us to accident and emergency and drop us off. I said "no", that I had been to accident and emergency three times and that he could not sit there anymore, that he could not do it. The gardaí refused to ring an ambulance for me so I sent my 15-year old out to the hall and I asked him to ring the ambulance. Eventually, the gardaí said they would get an ambulance for me. They told me that if my son continued they would arrest him, so I had to ask them to leave my house. In the end, they stayed as I think they realised what was going on. We were basically being labelled as a mother who has a brazen teenager who would not do as she says. That is how I felt that day. They asked me what he had taken and what he had been on. I said he was not on anything. I said he was suicidal and he was suffering from grief.

We went to accident and emergency that night when the ambulance came. My son, a fit and healthy 17-year old who was supposed to line out and play a hurling match the following day was brought in on a stretcher and wheeled catatonic into accident and emergency from an ambulance that night but he was alive. We spent that night in accident and emergency. I sat in the waiting room watching all the ads, such as "It's ok not to be ok", "Ask for help" and "Tell someone". That is absolute rubbish. There was nothing there for us when we went looking for it. It is a complete and utter contradiction and it is hypocritical. There was nothing there. We had been everywhere looking for help.

My son spent the night in accident and emergency. On Saturday at 9 a.m. he was brought down to the adult psychiatric ward. He was told that he would not be allowed to leave his room because he would be in danger from other patients there. He said he was not staying locked up in that place. I begged him to stay. He got up and he ran out of the hospital. There was a big lock-down. All the alarms were put on in the psychiatric ward. He slammed his head off a concrete wall and he was brought into a padded room. He turned around and he said, "Do you believe it. It is like Bobby Sands' room in here." He was a 17-year old boy whose father had died and that was what we got. He was in that padded room. They asked me to leave so they could calm him down. I left. I came back an hour or two later and he had been given a room. There was no staff. They had nobody to mind him. He was in danger from other psychiatric patients. They had to get an agency nurse in to mind him and to sit with him 24/7. I had to bring him in pyjamas. I had to take the cord out in case he hanged himself. I had to take the cord out of the hoodie he got from Santa in case he hanged himself. He was not allowed his bag. It was locked away. He was not allowed anything. He went in on Saturday morning.

We only saw a doctor because he poured a cup of coffee over his head to show me that he hated the place so much and that if I did not take him home he would kill himself, so he was physically examined to make sure he had not damaged himself. Thank God the coffee had cooled down enough so that he did not do any damage. Basically, he was left in that room until Monday evening. Nobody came to see him. We were told there was no child psychiatrist in the hospital and there was nobody there to see him. On Monday morning I asked what was going on and said he had to be seen by somebody. I told the doctors that day that if I had known that this was what was going to happen I would have just hired a security man to come and sit in his bedroom because we would have been better off. We waited all day for a child psychologist. The child psychologist in Wexford hospital had to finish her rounds before she could come to Waterford. There was no one to see him. I asked where the doctor was and she was upstairs on another ward seeing another patient. I was raging. I asked how any other patient in the hospital was more important than my son who had been in there since Friday night in the acute area of an adult psychiatric ward on lock-down. I asked who in the hospital was more important than him that he or she was seen before him. We had waited all weekend. At about 7.15 p.m the psychologist eventually came. I asked what they were going to do but I was told there was nothing they could do but that I had the option of sending him to Cork or Galway. I could not believe it. They were telling me to send my son to Cork or Galway, that he could go to a adolescent care centre there for psychiatric problems. I asked them how they seriously expected me to be a parent in Waterford and a parent in Cork or Galway at the same time. I could not do it, financially, physically or in any other way. The option I had was to leave him in the hospital.

I was told it would take about two weeks to get a place for him and that I could leave him in the acute psychiatric ward in Waterford until a place became available or I could take him home.

I took my son home that night, knowing full well he might not make it but I could not leave him in that ward a minute longer. We went home on his promise that the next time he wanted to kill himself he would tell me about it so I would help him get through it. The threat was that if he did anything behind my back he was going back into the ward. We went home and I sat in his room night after night. I took him off all the medication and I minded him myself, with my family, and we got through it. We went to private counselling and we got through it.

He tells me he will never ever get over being in that ward, and that it did more damage than anything ever done to him in his life. He is fine now. He asks me how I could do it to him. Now he is out of it everything is okay and he knows I had nowhere else to go. I trusted a health service that was supposed to be there, that advertises everywhere to get help and to come to it and it will help, but there is nothing. To be honest, I would not advise any parent, no matter how bad the child is, to put him or her in an adult psychiatric ward. It is the worst thing ever. I brought him home knowing I might lose him, but if I had a choice of that or leaving him there that is the choice I made.

He telephoned me from the hospital when I went home one night and he begged me to speak to his brothers. I asked him what he wanted to say and he said he needed to say goodbye because he would not be there the following day. I told him I could not leave him do that. He told me I could not deny him the chance to say goodbye to his two brothers. He told me he could not survive another night in there. That is what we went through.

We are, in a sense, everybody sitting here. Anybody sitting here could lose his or her partner in the morning. Their life could change. We are anybody. We are the children picked up and ferried to GAA matches. We are everybody. We are a normal family who looked for help. We have suffered enough. I buried my partner. They carried their father's coffin. That is what he had to go through and that was the help we got. Last week, when I told him I was doing this he told me he hoped the people here realise how hard this is, because this is not my story this is my son's story. It is easy for me to speak because I did not go through what he went through. Last week I told him if we can stop one other child going through what he had to live through something good will have come out of everything. He told me if he had lived in any other family he would be dead and that he would have managed to kill himself. I had great support. My father, my brother and my in-laws were fantastic. Other than that, my son would not be here. He is fantastic. He is doing an apprenticeship and he is absolutely brilliant again. He is so aware of mental health now. It is so important this is made into law. It cannot happen to anyone else.