Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Many questions have been answered and the meeting has been very informative. I commend the delegates from Jigsaw. Where I come from in Neilstown it is very good. I have been there a few times and it is well used by young people throughout the area. I have a couple of questions to ask.

I want to ask Mr. Rogan about his observations on the 1960s. If 23% of the health budget was spent on mental health services in the 1960s, that means many people would have been hospitalised in mental health services in the 1960s compared to 2018. Today some 6% of the health budget is spent on mental health services; therefore, obviously, a substantial number of people have been dehospitalised in the past 50 years. What is Mr. Rogan's take on it?

I have an observation on the use of social media and smartphones. We all use them and all think they are great to some extent, but they can have a serious dark side, too, particularly for young people. They can be individualistic in targeting young people because social media platforms are clever in targeting their market and their market is young people. That can play games with the heads of young people who can be so competitive against one another. We cannot get away from it, but social media can be detrimental, no matter who people are but particularly to young people. Will Mr. Rogan comment on this?

Are we dealing with bullying, specifically among young people? We are talking more about mental health services. The subject was taboo as nobody wanted to talk about his or her own mental health, but we are talking more about it than ever before. Since I became a Deputy, it has been one of the narratives of this Parliament. Talking about it is really good, but when one sees the flip-side, one sees that when people want to access mental health services, they cannot find them.

Some of the delegates before the committee have been really stark. They have shone a light on how mental health services have been really bad and let people down. It is due to a lack of funding, a lack of retention and recruitment of staff. I probably fell into the trap of playing this down a little a few times. Staff in mental health services are fantastic. They are both motivated and professional. It is important that the narrative from the public and here be that the service is in a perennial state of crisis. There is a crisis, from which there is no getting away. Where services are not available, people will fall through the cracks and when some fall through, they will die, as was seen on the documentary broadcast on RTÉ last week, "The Big Picture". It is unbelievable how quickly things can fall apart for families and individuals. There is major discontentment in a capitalist society which sometimes so competitive. Alienation drives people away from each other. Therefore, the more we talk about things and the more we, as humans, get together to collectivise our experiences and problems, the better it is for everybody's well-being. The pressure these days, particularly on social media, is incessant. Young people are on the phone all the time. That cannot be good for their mental health.