Dr. Joseph Duffy:

I thank the Deputy for his questions. I will concentrate on the first question, which was around the public perception of treating people. There is a very common discourse of talking about waiting lists, waiting times and the desire to get into the health service. There is very little discussion about what happens when a person is in there. One of the things we need to talk about is how effective services are, what are the outputs and how the services make a difference. When we work with young people, we are very much looking for feedback from them and their parents about the service.

The model that we operate on in terms of early intervention and prevention is that the young people come in and get some skills that help them over a crisis that they are in at the moment, but it also helps them to have skills to be able to make a difference in their lives in the future. They are very much encouraged, insofar as they can, to talk about that experience with others. We have had young people who were in a Jigsaw service check-in on Facebook and they let their friends and everybody else know through social media. It becomes a socially acceptable place to be. That is making a major difference in term of public understanding and in particular a generation to understand that one can talk about mental health in a different way. I hope that in ten or 20 years time, when that generation has children, there will be a big difference in this area.

We know from working with young people that it is necessary to be incredibly focused. We need to set goals with them that they set themselves. We need to know what their outcomes are and they need to see a tangible difference after four, five, six or seven sessions. That really makes a difference. Mr. Rogan mentioned earlier the recovery-focused care and it is about changing the conversation to know that when someone is within a service they know they can receive a treatment or support that will help them for a particular time and then move on from that. We want to move the conversation so that people can say if you go to Jigsaw or some other service, it will really help you. The biggest difference is that when peers do it, when young people tell other young people or adults tell other adults, that is how we learn the most. It is about changing that conversation to be able to say that if one can do it, it will help. The difficulty at present is that we are concentrating on waiting lists and it is also about the public being able to demand to know and ask about the effectiveness of the service. Is it value for money? Is it really making a difference? These are important questions.