John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

At the outset, I want to acknowledge the final comments made by Deputy Penrose. It is that kind of courageous contribution which helps advance the progress of the entire debate on mental health. I also want to acknowledge the work done by my colleague, Deputy Browne, on the Mental Health Parity Bill 2017. It is ironic to think that, in 2018, we are looking at the topic of mental health parity. However, I think we have come a long way.

I also want to acknowledge the role of the Acting Chairman, Deputy Durkan, who was here at the start of the debate and who is always here for the mental health debates. He inaugurated the mental health symposium at the start of this Dáil term. I know there is keen interest in the latter. Like Deputy Neville, I acknowledge the role of all parents, families, guardians, organisations, public servants, volunteers and particularly the front-line services, who keep our people mentally healthy by and large from one end of life to the other. Throughout their lives, they are there at key moments.

It has been stated that it takes a village to raise a child. That is certainly true. I am coming at this debate from a particular angle - acknowledging the value of every other contribution - but I will not incorporate my background because I have a limited amount of time to speak. It certainly takes a village to raise a child but, clearly, as we have seen from many of the scandals in this State over the last number of years, it takes a village to destroy a child. The HSE alone cannot solve this issue. Certainly it has to play a very key and very significant part in this.

I would like to quote, if I may, the poet John Milton. I quote him because of his insight when he said in one of his poems:

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

Those words were written 350 years ago. I think they provide an insight that is sobering to listen to today. Mental health is not a new, 21st-century issue. There were wise people and sages around many centuries ago who recognised that people were not only physical beings but also had a mental aspect to their lives that was very significant. That insight is as valuable in 21st-century Ireland as it was 350 years ago.

Clearly, mental health's time has come. Contributions such as those of Deputy Penrose and other Members in recent years, as well as other notable people in society who have helped to ensure that mental health can be talked about in an open way, have been the first wave of recognising that mental health's time has come. Clearly, however, as with any topic, the rubber has to start hitting the road at some point. Public figures have had the courage to come out and let people in wider society know how mental health issues have impacted on their lives. At what point do those disclosures create a real momentum? Will we take action to ensure that in 40 or 50 years, celebrities or public figures do not have to repeat the same kind of personal disclosure?

One of the things that struck me about the debate is that with mental health issues we are always reacting. It always seems to be fire-brigade action. As a society, we are only beginning to discuss the notion of being proactive in respect of mental health. Deputy Neville mentioned sports and things like that, and I will come back to that. That feeds into the notion that it takes a village to raise children. Every aspect of a person's environment and their community is important. One of the aspects that I want to focus on in the limited time I have is the value of mental wealth, as opposed to mental health. I refer to the importance of developing resilience in our community. "Bouncebackability", as the psychologist Maureen Gaffney calls it, is the ability of people to bounce back from the slings and arrows of life.

It allows them to discover they have the capacity to face any difficulty and that there are reserves of potential within human beings which need to be tapped into.

That knowledge, sense of resilience and the ability to bounce back are developed at a very early age. During my childhood, there was a great deal of running wild and free. Nowadays, play and play environments are controlled and it is difficult for children to take risks, be wild and discover they are resilient when they get cuts, scrapes and bruises and bounce back from them. I acknowledge, however, that I have often seen in my own professional and personal life just how fragile human beings are. I do not remotely take that for granted. To some degree, we are all on the cusp of physical illness and potentially on the cusp of mental illness. I have learned about the Irish predilection along the way and heard the phrase "lack of expression leads to depression". The inability to talk is a particularly Irish thing. People like Deputy Willie Penrose encourage people to express themselves. He said that a few minutes ago. If Deputy Penrose can do it, so can I.

Learning to express how one is feeling comes back to what Deputy Neville said. Expression takes many forms. It is not just verbal but can be in sport, the arts and any creative aspect of life. It can be in play, music or drama. From the earliest point in life, children ought to be educated in forms of expression. The ability to express oneself is very much dependent on the environment in which one is raised. Many children in this country, however, are not raised in an environment where the whole village is involved. In many cases, the village may be engaged consciously or unconsciously in keeping them down and fencing them in.

PwC has done a great deal of work on business and mental health in Australia. It has discovered that taking care of mental health is good for business and every $1 invested in mental health by a company gives a return of $2.30. No similar research has been done in Ireland. That is why I refer to the notion that it takes a village. The HSE cannot solve this. The whole community must get involved. We are nowhere close to raising the awareness that every facet of Irish life must be involved. We always talk about schools and front-line services, which are really important, but everyone and every institution in Irish society has a role to play and a stake in the mental health of our people. Work has also been done in Australia on the prevalence of particular types of mental illness in particular occupations. Such work has not been carried out here. They found in Australia that particular types of mental illness are prevalent in specific occupations. They did not look at politics, but they looked at other jobs.

Our pharmacies dispense drugs electronically now, but we have no way to track on a county-by-county basis the prevalence of prescribing anti-depressants or to determine why it might be higher in one county or town than another. Surely, we have the ability to harness that. It may be a question of investing in the technology which can provide the data. Doing so could be hugely valuable. We might discover a wealth of knowledge about where depression is more prevalent and devise policies to address that.

I repeat the phrase I started off with, which was related to Deputy Neville's concluding remarks: it takes a village to raise a child. Equally, it takes a village to destroy a child. Lack of expression leads to depression. Every child in this country must be encouraged and provided with the resources to express himself or herself, whether that is verbally, through sport, art, drama or in any creative way. We must start to develop resilience at that age. That is the kind of thing which leads to a mentally healthy and mentally wealthy society.

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