Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 9 October 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Children and Youth Affairs

Youth Mental Health: Discussion (Resumed)

Photo of Pat BuckleyPat Buckley (Cork East, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank all the witnesses for their honesty, which is important. Being the final speaker has given me a great opportunity to listen. I want to pick up on a few points that kept coming up, before throwing a few other points into the conversation. I will try to be as fast as I can.

We have heard about coping skills, funding and joined-up thinking, the many programmes and the 47 reports that have been produced. I was lucky to be a member of the progressive Joint Committee on the Future of Mental Health Care, which was shut down. Consensus was agreed and signed off by all parties. There is agreement on the issues. It gets difficult when it comes to trying to get legislation passed.

The television programme, "13 Reasons Why", has been mentioned. When it was aired, people came to me because they were panicking. I advised them to see what it was about first. I listened to people afterwards.

We have to be more outspoken. Some people thought it was very offensive, but my view was that it was very educational. I have been saying this for years, since I first educated myself about these issues. I have been a mental health advocate for many years. We need to get this issue into primary schools. We need to get back to civics. I was told at a conference that this could not be done because talking about mental health and suicide would put thoughts into people's heads. I said in the politest way possible that this was like saying that giving someone €20 to put petrol or diesel into a car means that the person is going to crash the car.

We have to get out of the bubble we are in. We are dealing with very different people nowadays. It is very different and complex stuff. Every time a person anywhere in the world buys a cup, a pen or a set of headphones, it comes with a set of instructions and a warning on the packaging. The Internet does not come with instructions or a warning. The younger generation has advanced very quickly. Young people have moved on. The Internet has made them slightly detached from reality. This is where I go back to education again. We are not giving our children the skills and the ability to cope with life's pressures as they come along. It has to start at an early age.

We expect that our parents will die at some stage. We are not going to like it, but we expect it to happen. This means we need the skills to deal with it. In the same way, people need the skills to deal with their sexuality or whatever the issue is. People need the skills to deal with relationship challenges. It goes on and on. It is probable that the most recent one or two generations do not have those skills. They have been lost. We have to go back to the education system to restore them. We have to resource it fully. Education in the area of mental health is not being resourced. It is being pushed along. Pilot projects have been spoken about. It has been suggested that the Samaritans will take this over, but they are not capable of doing so.

I am trying to build a picture here. While everything is moving in the right direction, it is not joined up. My biggest fear is that it is going to get lost. If we are talking about looking at demographics, as Deputy Eugene Murphy suggested earlier, we will all have problems. I recall that 69 young people took their lives in my local area between 2000 and 2002. When I spoke about it, I was criticised on the basis that I was bringing the tone of the area down. I found that disgusting. It is a question of education. How do all of the families affected feel?

Everyone who has come to me in the past two years, young and old, has said that even though they were being told that services were available and hearing the messages about minding their mental health that were being broadcast on television, they could not access the services they need. A person who has a disability in addition to a mental health requirement certainly will not access any service in the country. I have spoken to the Minister of State, Deputy Daly, about this. We need to start picking demographic areas in the country or in the CHOs to be targeted with fully resourced pilot projects.

The most frustrating thing I hear within CAMHS is that there is a premier league of 74 teams. One cannot have a premier league with 13 people on one team, nine people on another team, five people on next team and 22 people on yet another team. It does not work. Something has to be done in this regard. If we do not get to the crux of this from the start, and if we cannot provide the best ingredients to make the proper cake, it will not work.

It is ironic that we are speaking about this issue the day before World Mental Health Day. I will finish by asking two questions. I thank the Chair for her patience. In the honest opinion of the witnesses, are things going forward? What is the one thing they would change today to get things done right? We have had issues here. The Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) (Amendment) Bill 2019 has been sitting in the Chamber for almost three years. I am black and blue from trying to get it through the Chamber. I cannot do so.

Reference has been made to preventative measures. In July 2016, just after I was elected to this House, the first legislation I proposed was a simple Bill on the issue of suicide training and prevention. It provides that everyone who takes up a public sector job must do the SafeTALK programme. This would give people coping skills and spotting skills straight away. The political will does not exist to progress this legislation. These preventative measures are simple. I hope the witnesses understand where I am coming from when I talk about being bounced back into it. Are they happy with where we are now? If they could change something today, what would it be?

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