Kathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour)

Not everyone who requires support needs to attend a high-tech clinic. Perhaps people need to stay in their homes and receive telephone calls or postcards. Perhaps it is just about keeping in touch.

When it comes to suicide, to a great extent people want to be treated with kindness, respect and dignity. I hear this every day. We are too wedded to the medical model when it comes to mental health. Senator White was correct about education, in that we can educate general practitioners, GPs, community workers and social workers to make them realise when someone has a difficulty. Most GPs know that the majority of people presenting to them are doing so for reasons other than the ones they give. We need to get GPs to recognise when this is the case. However, if a GP's only possible course of action is to prescribe an anti-depressant or to send someone to the local psychiatric unit, people are not encouraged to present. We should focus on the piece in the middle, namely, primary care teams, whereby GPs will be able to send someone next door to a psychiatrist, social worker or counsellor if someone presents with a difficulty. A person needs to be able to tap into those services. It could be easily done. An entire unit in the Department of Health is telling people that the Department will provide an investment of €4 million if the recipients make savings of €8 million while supplying a better service by providing it differently. We will need acute beds but, if we move the bulk of our services from large institutions into communities, not only will there be a saving, there will also be a better way of doing things.

Most people who approach a GP, community nurse or Member want a listening ear and someone to put his or her arms around them and ask whether there is a problem. Where people with eating disorders are concerned, our first port of call is foraging for beds for them. We must stop doing that. We should be able to intervene with people at an earlier stage to stop such embedded behaviour from developing. We can do it. I feel like Obama.