MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES:DOCTORS ATTENDING the annual meeting of the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) yesterday were told by a former inpatient of a Dublin psychiatric hospital that the experience felt similar to being in the Abu Ghraib military prison in Iraq.
Áine, a middle-aged woman diagnosed with bipolar illness about seven years ago, described what it was like to be a client of the Irish mental health service “from the inside”.
Subsequently rediagnosed as having a borderline personality disorder, the woman, who is now well, was an inpatient on four occasions. A private patient, she continues to attend a consultant psychiatrist and clinical psychologist on an outpatient basis.
When first admitted to hospital because she was feeling suicidal, Áine, who did not provide her surname, said she was placed in a single room containing a dirty mattress and a single plastic chair.
She felt there was no alternative when someone was acutely ill but to “wait and see and protect the patient”.
She described being physically assaulted by a fellow patient and being spat on by another.
On her return to her job in the public service, she said she was afraid of being branded if she told co-workers about her illness.
Commenting on the fact that she is a private patient, Áine said: “I am privileged, and aware of it. I don’t have to start to tell my story to a new doctor every time [I am seen].”
Asked by Dr Cillian Twomey, consultant geriatrician at Cork University Hospital, how, in an ideal world, she would like to have been treated when she was acutely unwell, Áine said her ideal would be never to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
She said the best way to tackle the stigma surrounding psychological ill-health would be if a household name such as a TV personality spoke openly about having a severe mental illness and people could see how well they could function with the disease.
Carl O'Brien, Social Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times, told doctors mental health issues did not get the media coverage they deserved because, politically, the topic was not seen as important, and because the issues were not felt to be relevant to the population at large.
He suggested that mental health professionals and campaigners could learn from the successful shift of cancer from being a marginal issue to a major focus of health reform.
The appointment of a mental health “czar” could be key to effective reform, as would the destigmatisation of mental health through education and positive mental-health advertising campaigns. “Medical professionals must play a stronger role in speaking out for patients’ rights and for proper services,” he added.
Dr Justin Brophy, foundation president of the College of Psychiatry of Ireland, told the meeting the proportion of the health budget spent on mental health had halved between 1984 and 2006.