Ms Gr?inne Loughran:

There is a range of organisations, including Aware and Samaritans Ireland, that work with mental health issues more broadly. Samaritans released research this month showing that self-harm, which it looked at across the whole life course, is not just a young persons' issue and can persist throughout a lifetime. One participant had been engaging in self-harm for more than 50 years. There also are organisations like Bodywhys, for example, which deals with people with eating disorders. It has noted that clinically disordered eating can continue into older age and, in fact, that its duration may be longer in older adults than in younger people.

Many of these organisations are focused on issues generally across people's life course. As we mentioned, there are different symptoms of some mental health difficulties in older age and there is sometimes less focus on this. We are historically on the back foot on a range of aspects of mental health provision. For instance, the expert group that put together A Vision for Change in 2006 did not have input from psychiatry of older age teams. We are on the back foot across a range of areas and this is just one of them.