John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)

I thank the Minister of State. I echo the comments that were made about her tenure in charge of mental health policy and delivery in the Government. I also echo what the previous speaker said about the role of men's sheds and give a shout-out to ExWell.

Dr. Noel McCaffrey has been very involved in sport for many years. I am recovering from a pretty important medical intervention. ExWell is an exercise or kind of physical rehabilitation programme for anyone who is recovering from heart issues, cancers or chronic diseases. It has been rolled out and in my constituency there are three or four venues where scores of people turn up. It is essentially a kind of aerobics that is free for the first ten or 12 weeks. The older people who are there talk about the difference that exercise has made to their quality of life. It is subsidised by the HSE and is a positive thing. Social groups, choirs and golf societies have grown out of it. There has been a strong social dimension to it.

My experience is that I had open heart surgery a few years ago and thankfully I am recovering well. However, the one lesson I learned from that, one which I pass on to people whether or not they are willing to listen, is one sentence, not a long paper. It is that the doctor is your friend. When I talk to male colleagues who are talking about their health, I condense it to that one sentence - the doctor is your friend. Many male colleagues I chat to wince at the thought when I ask them whether they have spoken to their GPs.

It is probably not a fair analogy, but when I searched for analogies, it is the one I found. A lot of men would know pretty quickly if there was a problem with their cars from the sound and would address it, generally pretty quickly. We are not the best at self-diagnostics, because there are many times when things are going on inside our bodies and without a blood test or check, we cannot know something is wrong. Often, we have a physical, emotional or psychological sense that something is a little amiss and we need to check it out. I have distilled it for physical health - I will repeat it - as "the doctor is your friend".

I can only speak for myself, but I think we are all afraid of getting bad news. That is understandable, but I suspect that in a huge proportion of cases things are treatable. Is it not better to get news about something and have it treated, than not seek help and find that whatever has been ailing you has got to a point where it is untreatable or the invention required is far more acute? The doctor is your friend.

In mental health, as a practising psychotherapist, for men I reduced the idea to this sentence - I do not like oversimplifying things, but I have said this to the Minister of State before in the Chamber - "lack of expression leads to depression". It is a simple message about the talking cure, talking to people. What is interesting about the statistics that were presented, and which I will not restate, is that at one end of the scale, in our youth, we probably have the fittest generation of people we ever had. Someone mentioned sport and I was in Parnell Park last Sunday. On the other end of the scale, we have an explosion of chronic illnesses. There are a lot of interventions that can be made policy-wise. The Government cannot do everything, but it can look at addressing a bit of the fear, sending the message that the doctor is your friend and exploring what frightens people out of taking steps.

As a slight aside, women were patronised terribly in advertising over the years, but I notice that men are often stereotyped as stupid in a lot of modern advertising.

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