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

The north Kerry child and adolescent mental health services, CAMHS, scandal brought to light a much longer-term scandal of the over-medication of young people compensating for the chronic lack of staffing and resources in our mental health services.

I want to ask particularly about the utter lack of community psychology and primary care psychology. One aspect of this, and I have been trying to point this out for a long time, is that CAMHS gets overrun, and often with referrals that probably should not even go to it, because of the lack of community psychology and talk, occupational, speech and language therapy. This is not just for child and adolescent community psychology, or the lack of it, but also for others.

I am aware of a case at the moment of a man whose doctors referred him for psychology. He was told by community psychology in my area that he will have to wait six years for a psychologist. What happened to primary care? It does not exist in the area of psychology. As I have raised repeatedly with the Taoiseach, why do we make it difficult for young people who want to be psychologists to qualify because we do not fund educational and counselling psychology? We have massive fees of up to €15,000 and similar obstacles in the area of psychiatry for people being qualified.

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