Kathleen Funchion (Carlow-Kilkenny, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I take this time to speak specifically about the child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS.

I speak as a parent of someone who has had personal experience. It is an issue close to home for me. I do not want to talk about the waiting times because we all know there are significant delays in getting into CAMHS. The waiting times are disgraceful. There is nothing we can say about that only that we need to recruit more staff so that there are not waiting times. I want to talk about when a person first realises that their child potentially has a mental health difficulty. It could be the parent who notices or it could be a teacher who brings this to the parent's attention. It is a difficult thing to deal with. No matter what is said and no matter how often it is said it is okay not to be okay, a parent still feels he or she is still failing a child if he or she has to access CAMHS. There is no point saying anything else about that.

I find it is an extremely faceless service. It is all paperwork. The bunch of forms are asking questions at a time when it is hard to process what is going on and what the difficulties might be. People have 14 days to return the forms. Then a whole load of information about drop-in and walk-in clinics is sent out. It states that if a parent is concerned for a child, he or she can drop into this or that clinic. Of course the parent is concerned for his or her child. That is why he or she is accessing CAMHS in the first place. Much of the information is difficult to digest and it has to be dealt with at an already difficult time in the lives of parents and children. Many people at that point just cannot cope with it and do not know where to go or what to do with the information. It would be far better if there was a phone service or a face to face service where people could go in and speak to someone who could assist with the forms. A parent is not a mental health expert and cannot say what category a child falls into. That is really important because we need to have it as an accessible service at the very start.

Then we need to look at the waiting times. It is extremely frustrating when a parent knows there is a difficulty but cannot do anything about it. As a parent, not being able to help a child is one of the worse feelings in the whole world. The child is on a waiting list and the parent is pulling his or her hair out trying to deal with it. It is okay for people who can access private services. However, not everyone is going to be able to do that and not all the private services suit children's mental health. We need to make CAMHS much more accessible, much more friendly, much more helpful and we definitely need to look at the waiting times and the lists. We need to ensure children are not left languishing on a list and then turn into an adult with even more difficulties and problems.

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