Jim Daly (Cork South West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Corcoran Kennedy asked about social media also. She might be aware that the Government launched a policy this morning to deal with that. That has been very much the focus of Government. It not a health issue or a mental health issue. I have deliberately stood back in that regard. I am involved and very interested in it but it was never for me to take the lead on it because that would suggest it is a mental health issue that should be dealt with under mental health only.

The most interesting development I have seen in Government and Civil Service circles since I became a national politician in 2011 is the Pathfinder project, which is four Departments, the Departments of Justice, Children and Youth Affairs, Education and Skills and Health, working together for the first time in the history of the State. They meet at section level and the very first topic they have chosen to pursue under Pathfinder is mental health. The Departments will work side by side and meet on a weekly basis with people at principal officer, PO, assistant principal officer, APO, level or whatever. A substantial number of staff are being resourced and aligned to this particular project to ensure all of them are working together on it.

Somebody asked what is happening in the area of schools. That is where the future of mental health lies. We have to support resilience and stop the escalation in the need for CAMHS. If we keep chasing the system with hundreds of millions of euro and continue to put more inpatient beds into it, we will miss out on the need to build an infrastructure at that level and put a focus on it. We spend much of our time talking about the waiting lists because they are easy to manage and repeat but we need to examine the supports we are putting in at the basic level, and particularly in education. There is a superb programme, DBT STEPS-A programme, which has come here from America. I do not know if any of the members are familiar with it but, essentially, it equips students how to recognise their feelings. We had a presentation on it by Kinsale Community School at the launch of the youth mental health task force. Essentially, the programme gives students the skills necessary to identify their feelings and articulate - that is the key word - their anxieties, fear or whatever. We need to build on that but it is about getting the balance right. I cannot neglect what the tertiary level is trying to do but we are trying to reorientate the system towards primary level interventions, support that and build on that support. It is similar to what we are trying to do in physical health in terms of primary care, community care, prevention being better than the cure and so on. That is a difficult balance to achieve.