Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I would like to focus first on the now redundant Joint Committee on the Future of Mental Health Care, of which my colleague, Deputy Gino Kenny, was a member. The committee identified that the problem in CAMHS stems from the lack of early intervention, early diagnosis and early assessment. All of us have dealt with cases involving parents who are concerned for their children at an early age and cannot access assessments for them. In one such case, the parents are engaging with the legal system on behalf of their child who is almost two years waiting for an assessment. The future for this young boy if he does not access early intervention will be a lifetime in CAMHS. He will probably end up on medication. Owing to the lack of psychologists, speech therapists and nurses, bed occupancy in CAMHS at any given time is 50%. I know this because Linn Dara, one of the units providing a national service, is in my area and we regularly picket it since 11 of its 22 beds are regularly closed. Young children who do not get early assessments and intervention from psychologists, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, etc., end up in CAMHS or being medicated. Service users are being failed by a lack of psychologists. Psychologists are walking away from the job in frustration because all that is available to these children is medication rather than the therapies they deserve. We will then treat them as adults with serious mental health difficulties in a system which has utterly failed them.

It is 13 years since a Vision for Change was launched. I think last week was the anniversary of its launch. It is not just this Government but successive Governments, successive Ministers and the Department of Health have failed to implement that vision. Of 108 beds, 50 are usually occupied while the rest of them lie empty. As Deputy Barry said, psychiatric nurses are starting an overtime ban today and will be joining the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, in strike action in another week and a half. That is not something they do for pleasure, for joy or for the craic or because they are selfish professionals. It is because there is a crisis in our mental health services which the Minister of State - this is not a personal - and those who preceded him have utterly failed in terms of young people. Legal cases will be taken and will force the HSE to deal with this problem.

The new head of the HSE said that the primacy of early intervention is where the problem with CAMHS starts. Ms Anne O'Connor was head of mental health and she now saying that CAMHS is a secondary service but it is the early service that is lacking. I speak for tens of thousands of parents who are distressed, concerned and worried about their children who are not getting the services that they need. We are going to end up with mental health services that are in a continuous crisis situation where if one system fails, the following systems fail and there is no future for people who are in desperate situations.

I do not know the Minister of State is going to address this but I would argue that multiple issues need to be addressed. One of them, crucially, is staffing and the psychiatric nurses are doing something about that and are putting it up to the Minister of State and the Government to pay them properly so that they can retain their numbers and continue to recruit the numbers needed.

I am sure child psychiatrists would love to do something similar and put it up to the Government because they are exiting the service and are voting with their feet by pulling out of the service. It is in crisis. The mental health committee should give the numbers needed to get out of this crisis. That committee should reconvene. The necessary steps must be taken.

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