Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

On Monday morning, I met a group of parents of children with various disabilities to discuss child and adult mental health services, CAMHS, in Sligo. Last week, the senior child psychiatrist resigned. She had only been in the position for four months and I think her predecessor was in the position for even a shorter period. There has been chopping and changing for the past two years. There is a huge backlog of children who have serious problems and their parents are absolutely out of their minds. It reminded me of the television programme, "Living on the List"; it was a similar kind of situation. These families are very worried. Their children are waiting for months on end to be assessed. Then, when recommendations are made that services be put forward for them, they find the psychologist, speech therapist or OTs are not in place to provide those services. It is a crisis in the Sligo-Leitrim area. It is not that one child psychiatrist needs to be recruited; two need to be recruited to deal with the backlog. One parent told me how she had to hide the knives and cutlery in the house-----

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