Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The scandal that has been revealed in Kerry, involving overmedication, losing files and children and young people with mental health issues not being looked after properly, is not at all unique to Kerry. In 2018, psychiatrists in Wexford, including the consultant in CAMHS, resigned, saying the service was totally unsafe. Dr. Sharma said he was sidelined because he expressed concerns about the overmedication of children. I know of other people, and I will not mention their names, who were witch-hunted in CAMHS by the HSE because they protested at the level of overmedication. Overmedication was compensating for the lack of staff and resources. That is what is happening, and it is a scandal. We have to monitor this.

It is self-evident that there has been a stratospheric increase in the medication of children in this country and across the world over recent years. That is what is happening. If one wants to help young people with mental health problems, one starts, as Deputy Barry said, by talking to them. That is the essence of psychology, psychotherapy and proper psychiatry - talking to them and asking what is wrong. However, one needs qualified people to do that, and we do not have the qualified people. That is the problem. It starts at primary care. If a young person is having difficulties, he or she goes to the GP. What does the GP do? Effectively, there are no primary care services to which the young person can be referred. We do not have enough psychologists. We do not have psychology departments in our schools, which we should have. Many other countries have them, including the United States. We do not have a staffed primary care mental health service, and CAMHS are nowhere near what was promised in A Vision for Change years ago. We have failed so spectacularly on A Vision for Change that we revised it down in terms of staff numbers to cover up our failure.

We removed the original targets for psychology in A Vision for Change completely. That is what is going on. It is a running scandal and those who raise that scandal are witch-hunted in the HSE because nobody wants to admit the truth. Children are suffering because we have failed.

We might then think about what we must do but perhaps we should start getting some of the psychologists, occupational therapists and speech and language therapists we need. However, we make it as difficult as possible for people to qualify with doctorates in psychology. We charge them €15,000 in fees so they drop out. We give no funding whatever to educational and counselling psychology. We give a little bit to clinical but none to educational and counselling psychology. All our young psychologists, after getting their basic degrees, go to Utrecht in the Netherlands. They get proper jobs over there and do not have to pay massive fees to qualify in psychology.

That is the essence of the problem, which has been known for years. It was identified in A Vision for Change more than a decade ago. We have failed and failed again, and as a result we end up overmedicating our young people. We have seen the terrible consequences of that in Kerry. We must get real and start having psychologists in schools. We must staff the primary care mental health services and the CAMHS we need. We must of course address some of the big issues by listening to young people; they would tell us what matters affect them.

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