Mr. Ian Power:

On the point on accessing mental health services and awareness of how to access them, we often place emphasis on the burden of understanding what service one is meant to go to on the person as opposed to helping that person navigate towards the service he needs. One of the recommendations in the youth mental health task force guidelines was on a digital signposting tool that would use artificial intelligence to ask a person questions about what he or she is feeling in order to narrow down the number of appropriate services. There has been good work done on that in Australia. ReachOut Australia has a tool called NextSteps and it has sound clinical governance underpinning it. The HSE is currently considering replicating something similar here. We hope it could be done in a relatively quick timeframe to respond to the point the Deputy raised.

Similarly, with regard to texting, we know young people do not do anything by picking up the telephone anymore. Since they do not order a pizza or taxi by telephone, why would they talk about the most vulnerable aspect of themselves, namely, their mental health, over the telephone? Why would they feel comfortable in doing so?

One of the other recommendations in the task force report was on scaling the provision of active listening services, such as the Samaritans and Childline, but through texting and live chat, including services such as Facebook Messenger. In the United States, services such as Crisis Text Line are extremely popular, fulfilling a great demand for young people who want to talk to somebody in moments of crisis. Such services are obviously not to supplant other services, as my colleague from Mental Health Ireland mentioned, but they help to get people from a heated moment to a cool calm moment when they can move on to another service. We really need to step up the sense of urgency in regard to services like those.

I take the point on resilience and education. Education should start from the early years and extend right up through primary, secondary and tertiary education. With regard to one of the points Deputy O'Loughlin made on resilience and what is most effective, there are a number of really effective evidence-based interventions in terms of resilience-building but we need to come together to agree on which we are going to back and which we want to see mainstreamed. There is too much fragmentation in what is being provided. That leads to inconsistency in the educational experience of children and young people around the country. This is not dissimilar to the issue of sex education.

We need to have a situation whereby such education is standardised and ensure that every young person gets the same quality experience.

Finally, there is a supply and demand equation when it comes to recruitment. Let us remember that when supply is lower than demand then the price increases. Therefore, we should pay competitive rates to attract qualified people from around the world to work in the mental health service here. Such an initiative is difficult because it has ramifications for elsewhere in the public sector. We need to start working on what Dr. Duffy mentioned and increase the pool of qualified people here, domestically, over time through the Irish education system.