Mary Butler (Waterford, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Senator for raising this matter. I always look forward to coming to the Seanad and to any opportunity I can get to speak about mental heath and the fact that recovery is possible. Lived experience and what patients go through is something we have to listen to and learn from. That is important.

The answer that has been presented to me relates to crisis resolution services but I will speak in general first. One in four people, at some stage in their life, will have an issue with their mental health.Thankfully, we are speaking more openly and more freely about it now. For many people, a visit to their GP and the support received from there can be sufficient, but there are other people who may have an acute mental health episode which might require a great deal of help, which is why we have more than 68 approved centres in the country, which are departments of psychiatry. These are for people who would have an acute mental health challenge and who need support. It is important people reach out for those supports because, unfortunately, in Ireland, we are seeing that three quarters of all suicides in Ireland are men and one quarter are female. I am very conscious of the fact that Sunday was International Men's Day and this is International Men's Health Week. A very significant proportion of people, men in particular, who need supports are not reaching out. That was not the case being presented by the Senator today and I cannot speak to an individual case. In this case, men of different ages reached out for help and they felt the help they got was not sufficient.

On 26 May this year, I launched the crisis resolution services model of care. It represents a significant step forward in the provision of targeted mental health supports for people experiencing a crisis. It also fulfils a long-standing goal, aligning with a number of recommendations in Sharing the Vision, our national mental health policy. Our national mental health policy puts the service user front and centre. It is cross-departmental because if a person has issues outside of his or her health or issues with regard to housing, social protection or justice, it can trigger a mental health episode.

The demand for a crisis resolution services model of care arose from the recognition that those experiencing mental health crises often require specialist supports after hours and at weekends. It offers person-centred intensive supports in a timely way to assist the service user in his or her recovery journey. Importantly, it seeks to offer an alternative to inpatient admission. The national crisis resolution service steering group was responsible for overseeing and advising on the design and development of a model of care and pilot implementation plan. Membership included representatives from each location and national representatives such as psychiatry, social work, occupational therapy, psychology, nursing, mental health operations, mental health planning, etc.

Crisis resolution teams are community-based multidisciplinary teams that provide rapid assessment and intensive support to individuals who are in a mental health crisis, working rapidly and co-operatively to help people in a mental health crisis. This pilot scheme sees the incorporation of the teams in five different pilot learning sites: CHO 1, CHO 4, CHO 5 and CHO 6, and a fifth site due to open in quarter 4 of 2023. The reason these particular areas were picked is that these were identified as areas with very poor supports out of hours. The other areas would have been deemed as having supports out of hours. Crisis resolution teams will also play a role in supporting out-of-hours crisis cafés, or solace cafés. They will provide a friendly and supportive crisis prevention and response service. They will run in partnership with different community agencies. I will continue my contribution in my next part.