Mr. Mick Williams:

Deputy Lahart mentioned specialist care and his heart issues. I wish him good health in that regard. On the question of not being a specialist, I am. The Deputy mentioned training in psychotherapy. I trained as a psychotherapist as well. I also did addiction-specific and mental health-specific training. All of them have the same correlations and modalities. They all work from a psychosocial perspective. When being delivered on the ground, each of these types of specialist care are similar or the same or are based on similar or the same theories. Recovery from mental health issues or recovery from addiction is similar, if not the same. To call one service specialist care over another one is sometimes a little bit insulting when one is working in community. We understand that there are specialist care services and we use them specifically for what they can do. It is not the whole model and it is not where we want to be.

In a community setting, especially in psychiatry, we cannot prescribe medication and I am not advocating that we do prescribe. However, sometimes the prescription substance is what we are trying to avoid or we are trying to get people to decrease and that is where it becomes challenging but that is where the specialist service is a need for the community.

It is not to undermine what community projects do. Community projects are very specialised in their area, and have huge expertise dealing with people who have mental health issues and addictions. On a huge scale they are just dealing with people, not with their diagnosis and not with their label. We do not see their label or their diagnosis. We see them as people. We treat people, and people are recovering.