Mr. Michael Ryan:

I thank Deputy Hourigan for her question. Head 4 was one of the areas that came up in on our consultations as well. I note that in the earlier drafts the word "disorder" had been dropped but it now seems to have resurfaced. As Ms Coyle said, in understanding the context of this and the importance of language, in the last few years, thankfully, there has been a growing understanding of the spectrum of mental health from mental well-being to acute mental health challenges. We have to be careful that we do not lessen or reduce the significance of people who suffer from severe mental health challenges in our attempts to get people talking about mental health and so on. We have tried to make it as populous as possible. There remains a difference between somebody who has anxiety at the milder end of the scale and somebody who has severe and enduring mental health challenges. In our consultation, there was a lot of feedback on this and there certainly was not consensus. Many people believed the word "illness" captured the enduring and severe end of the spectrum well and people are familiar with the word "illness". I certainly would not be happy with the continuation of the word "disorder" but on balance, the word "illness" would be more acceptable. The Deputy raised a very important point about people with intellectual challenges and that needs to be decoupled. That is a different condition and it is not appropriate that it is classified there.