Ms Jennifer Hough:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to address it. Unfortunately, I am participating today because my sister, Valerie, died by suicide in January 2020. She was 42 years of age and spent the best part of 25 years interacting with the mental health services at various points in her life. In spite of all of this, she lived a good life - this is an important point to make - and was well much of the time. She was a preschool teacher, she travelled a great deal, she was a great sportswoman - she played golf and badminton - and she had many great friends and loved ones. She deserved so much more, though, and her life, her potential and her opportunities were seriously hampered by a label of "bipolar", the "medication for life" mantra and the coercive nature of our mental health system. She was just 15 years of age when a professional first described her as having depression and hypomania. By the time she was 19, she had the lifelong label of "bipolar" and had already been given a range of powerful psychiatric drugs that did not make matters any better and undoubtedly made them worse.

The medical model of mental health treatment we are discussing means that, once someone gets a diagnosis, medication becomes the main focus of treatment. My sister was bipolar, so the story that she was disordered told her that she was the problem. Her brain, her make-up and her biology were the problem. Asking for help from such a system is counter-intuitive because the help on offer comes at great cost, including the potential loss of liberty. My sister was sectioned and detained twice, but that is a whole other story that I do not have time to go into today. Other costs are mind-altering medications and traumatising environments with very little therapeutic value, if any, despite the best efforts of those working in them. Talking is almost discouraged in the mainstream mental health system because there is no one there to talk to and, as we all know, real talk therapy takes a great deal of time and investment. Instead, the Band-Aids - the medications - are applied and the trauma for which people are there in the first place and the great stigma around mental health issues continue.

Sometimes, there are not even Band-Aids. I sat with my sister once in an overcrowded accident and emergency department. Later, she was locked into a stroke ward for safety. I suppose people were kept there in case they wandered out. She stayed there for a whole weekend and was then sent home with no mental health intervention at all. She just could not face all of this anymore. She had been there too many times, been traumatised and retraumatised, and been hit by the revolving door on the way out.

My sister's right to health and life was denied by a system that did not treat people holistically, medicated human distress over understanding it, and retraumatised them by wielding significant power over their lives. For example, if people do not take their medications, they are seen as not having insight or as being non-compliant. This can mean they have to stay longer in hospital. Even if they are voluntary patients, the threat of being made involuntary is always there. Over the years, my sister learned how to become a good patient and become compliant. That takes people's voices away and makes them powerless. Their voices are seen as not valid or not compliant.

If we want to change how we treat people in greatest need, we must start demanding it. Last year, the World Health Organization released a report signalling the failure of biomedical mental health systems. It stated that mental health systems overdiagnosed human distress and over-relied on psychotropic drugs to the detriment of psychosocial interventions, and that a fundamental shift within the mental health field was required.

We need to face up to the realisation that treating people with drugs is behaviour modification, not treatment. We are giving people drugs to change their state of mind, not to cure some supposed underlying disease or biological abnormality. We have all heard the stories about Kerry CAMHS in recent months. I wonder how many young people are starting on the same path my sister was put on at 15 years of age. Are young people being told they have a mental disorder for life and that they have to take medications for it? Is that really how we are still treating our young people?

It is no longer acceptable that mental health services do not actively seek to get to the root of people's trauma. Above anything else, this should be their raison d'être. At the very least and as a matter of urgency, mental health services must be guided by human rights-based, person-centred principles and provide accurate and objective information.

This is basic informed consent, but it does not happen. Services should seek to understand and address people's life experiences without coercive practices. Again, this does not happen. People should not be maintained on psychiatric drugs without close monitoring and a plan to reduce them as much as possible, but this is not the case. We have to stop medicalising human distress. We need to listen to people's stories and the growing chorus of expert evidence and research that says that mental health systems based on labels and drug treatment are not working and are, in fact, further harming and stigmatising people.

I thank members for listening.