Failure of mental health services

Madam, - The report from the Inspector of Mental Health Services (The Irish Times, July 7th) represents a singular indictment…

Madam, - The report from the Inspector of Mental Health Services (The Irish Times, July 7th) represents a singular indictment of the State's failure to care for the most vulnerable. Once again, despite our prosperity, it comes down to lack of resources - but also, it must be said, to the marginalising of those who had the courage to speak out over many years as services deteriorated.

We believe that the mental hospitals must be closed down; but unless adequate services and accommodation are provided in the community, simply relocating people without providing proper care and rehabilitative opportunities is a recipe for further suffering.

As we have found over the years, and as the Inspector of Mental Health Services has now reported, a lack of resources, poor multidisciplinary teams and few if any specialist mental health teams in the community mean that people with severe problems very easily slip through the net and end up homeless on the street. In other words, there is no mystery as to why many of those who find themselves homeless have mental health problems and those with mental health problems find themselves homeless.

Meanwhile, we still seem to have difficulty learning from our mistakes in the past. When the report from the Expert Group on Mental Health Policy was published recently, Trust pointed out that as mental hospitals are closed, careful provision for proper accommodation and services in the community must be made or many former patients could become homeless, as happened so often in the past.

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Minister of State Tim O'Malley responded to our criticism by saying that the developers who buy the hospitals must incorporate housing provision for former patients, but we are still waiting to see his detailed plans. And as the Inspector of Mental Health Services has pointed out, there is very little help in the community for most patients at the moment. And when the hospitals are closed, if former patients do get housing with the compliments of the developers involved, what kind of mental health care is he going to provide for them in the community?

At the moment official enthusiasm for closing mental hospitals looks like a cost-cutting policy in the making: moving very vulnerable people out of miserable conditions into equal, but less visible, misery and poverty. - Yours, etc,

ALICE LEAHY, Director and Co-Founder, Trust, Bride Road, Dublin 8.