Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The difficulty I have is not that there may not be a place for it in a functioning mental health system but that we have a dysfunctional mental health system and the supports do not exist at the moment. This is something I have recently taken an interest in. My worry is that this is a cheap way of offering support. It is, obviously, always going to be less labour-intensive and all of that. Dr. McDaid stated that a person may not want to walk down the high street and walk into a shop with a sign up advertising "mental health supports". However, those supports are not there so that option is not there either. It is not that people are saying that there is a range of supports available to them and that they wish to choose the one that is being offered online. My concern is that people are saying there is literally nothing available. They want to talk face to face with a person and to be the one who walks down the street and goes through that door. They are actively seeking help but all they are getting is an app.

Dr. McDaid makes a very relevant point that this may be appropriate where it is book-ended by professionals, where they are available. My fear, and my understanding, is that these crisis text lines do not necessarily deliver this type of support. As the studies go on, there will be evidence that they operate as a complement to services, which is not necessarily a bad idea, but if they are the service itself, they will be wholly inadequate. In a space where we have difficulty recruiting and retaining staff, this becomes nearly an outsourced way of doing it. That is where my concerns would lie.