Michael Collins (Cork South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

According to the Healthy Ireland Survey 2015, some 9% of the Irish population over the age of 15 has a probable mental health problem, PMHP, at any one time. This equates to approximately 325,000 people, based on Census 2011 population data.

Ireland also has very high rates of suicide. It has the fourth highest rate of suicide among young males and females aged 15-to-19 years across 31 European countries. Despite the high need for mental health supports, they continue to be severely under resourced. I am calling on the Government to protect and sustain existing funding and invest in the continued realisation of A Vision for Change. The Government must fully realise its commitments to mental health, and adequately invest in mental health in order to improve the mental health outcomes of adults and children living in Ireland.

Ten years after the publication of A Vision for Change, mental health services are still not uniformly providing the basic model of care that includes 24-7 crisis intervention, home-based and assertive outreach treatment, with crisis houses, as the norm in all areas. I fully support this motion by Sinn Féin. I recognise that it needs to be implemented urgently.

In the absence of community-based supports, emergency departments, EDs, are often the only option for individuals in crisis, as by their nature crises often occur out of hours. In 2014, the number of people presenting to emergency departments throughout the country following self-harm was close to 10,000. If one is having a mental health crisis, then waiting in a busy ED is not the best place to be. Similarly, if one is waiting for physical care in an ED, waiting alongside people in acute mental distress can make a difficult situation even harder.

I propose that this motion should also include the need for supported living to be provided to those in need as a statutory requirement to allow them to continue on their journey of recovery. There are patients in the psychiatric hospitals who are taking up a bed and are not able to continue on their journey of recovery due to not having anywhere to live once they are discharged. If the HSE cannot provide these units itself, it needs to allocate funding for the services through private health care providers.

There should also be a statutory right to advocacy, as recommended in A Vision for Change. It recommends that all users of the mental health services, whether in hospitals, day centres, training centres, clinics or elsewhere, should have the right to use the services of a mental health advocate. This right has yet to realised.

Overall, what is needed is an increase in the mental health budget to improve the service. We allocate only approximately 6% of our health budget to mental health care services. We need to increase this allocation in line with international practice. In Great Britain and Canada the mental health budget is 12% of the overall health spend and in New Zealand it is 11%. We need to start treating mental health well-being as an equal of our physical health. Our mental health well-being needs to be looked after and protected in the same way as we look after and protect our physical health.

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