Martin Daly (Roscommon-Galway, Fianna Fail)

I support the Minister on this. Language is important. Trying to come up with language that pleases everyone is difficult, but the terms "mental health difficulties" and "psychosocial disability" are too broad for some of the conditions we are talking about. My understanding of the term "mental health disorder" is someone who has a clinically diagnosed condition that is persistent and causing ongoing disability for that person. We are talking about people with schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder, or with persistent anxiety and depression. "Mental health difficulties" is just too broad a term. It encompasses things that may well be transient that affect mental well-being or health. For example, if people have a bad day or are stressed, that is a mental health difficulty. They might feel better tomorrow because they had a good night's sleep. I do not want to trivialise this, but we need to give weight to psychotic conditions where people are seriously ill or to people who have neurotic conditions with severe persistent symptoms that are dysfunctional. We have to give way to that. At this time, "mental disorder" is probably the best term.

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