Séamus Healy (Tipperary, Workers and Unemployed Action Group) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Mental Health Parity Bill 2017. I compliment Deputy Browne on bringing it forward and I confirm my support for the Bill. The Bill represents another step in the journey to bring mental health into the heart of the community and give it equal status with physical health.

When I think of the journey of institutional care to the centrality of community-based services I think of my late dad, who worked as a psychiatric nurse at St. Luke's Hospital, Clonmel for over 40 years. He joined the staff in 1932 as a warder - there were no psychiatric nurses then. Although he was always a very gentle and compassionate man, the emphasis in the work at the time was on physicality and patient restraint. In his early days, St. Luke's had little or no contact with the outside world. There were locked main gates controlled by gate lodges, 8 ft high walls and locked wards but his generation of work colleagues quickly became qualified psychiatric nurses and began the journey to create a humane service. They tore down the walls, did away with the gate lodges and the locked gates and invited local people in to integrate the hospital and its patients into the local community.

They did trojan work and they came a long way but a lot more needs to be done. The challenge now is to make mental health services truly community-based and able to provide an immediate response to persons experiencing mental health difficulties in the same way as we have now for people with physical health difficulties. The key to this is to resource and fund mental health properly. For too long it has been the Cinderella of the service. We need a proper out-of-hours service, 24-7 crisis intervention teams providing rapid assessment and a comprehensive primary care counselling service. We also need to staff our community-based teams and the child and adolescent mental health teams fully. It is also vitally important to resource and support community organisations which do tremendous work across the country. In my area there is the River Suir Suicide Patrol, TaxiWatch and the C-Saw community suicide awareness workers. They are all volunteers but they work tremendously long hours on an ongoing basis in support of persons with mental difficulties. Talk therapies are important in this journey to truly community-based mental health services whereby we can react immediately to persons with difficulties.

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