What does each political party say about mental health ?
The Green Party's Policy on Childcare
Objective One: Improving Personal Well-being
Introduction
Objective One will focus on children’s physical and mental health in regard to the provision of Government health services and health education.
A.2 Growing Up
A.2.1 Accessibility to Health Knowledge and Services [Prevention and Cure]
In line with the Green Party’s focus on primary healthcare, it will be our policy to extend accessibility and awareness of health services, promote health education, and give far greater priority to community healthcare. Access to good healthcare should not be dependent on the ability to pay.
The Green Party will ensure that:
- Medical cards are extended to all children under 18;
- Increased funding is provided to community groups, schools, and other appropriate family support structures to facilitate ongoing information, education and training for all parents as their children grow and develop. Such services will be provided in all communities, not just disadvantaged.
- Preventative medicine and early detection are boosted via such measures as increasing the frequency of developmental medical checks in schools.
- The prevention and treatment of allergies and asthma are given major attention and that a network of regional public health facilities specialising in the diagnosis and treatment of allergic conditions are established. The Green Party will continue to pursue policies that diminish the contributory factors to these health problems, such as smoking, poor air quality, food additives and pesticides.
- Repeal the Disability Act 2005 to assure ‘rights-based’ access to services;
- Free and confidential health centres for young people under 25, such as piloted by the Cork-based Youth Health Service, will be established in other parts of the country;
- The health promotion unit within the Department of Health is given increased resources and a higher profile;
- A national sexual health strategy is developed and the present sex education programmes in schools are updated and seen to be fully implemented.
A.2.2 Increased Awareness of Mental Health
Irish youth suicide rates are the fifth highest in the EU. Child and adolescent mental health services are grossly under-resourced and developed. Children have been inappropriately treated in adult units and those with behavioural and mental health problems detained in prisons and places of detention when their behavioural and mental health problems should have been properly treated.
The issue of child abuse has also been well documented. All measures must be put in place to protect children, and vetting plans for those working with children must be implemented as a matter of urgency. Parents should be encouraged to be pro-active in assuring that
organisations in which their children are involved have adequate child protection policies in place. The ‘stay safe’ programmes must be fully implemented in our schools.
The Green Party will:
- Encourage school-based preventive mental health interventions that work in liaison with parents in early detection of mental health problems;
- Institute comprehensive data collection systems to determine the uptake of mental health services by children, waiting list figures, etc., to facilitate the better provision of services and planning;
- Introduce mental health education, dealing with a range of issues from depression to bullying, to the secondary school curriculum;
- Increase the children’s mental health staff numbers via innovative training programmes (as advocated by the World Health Organisation and Amnesty International);
- Ensure that within every health board area there is an inpatient psychiatric treatment unit for young people;
- Support a Constitutional amendment enhancing the rights of children and the supremacy of the welfare of the child, and allowing children to access support services independently of adults;
- Establish the Register of Persons considered unsafe to work with children and ensure that the Gardaí Vetting Unit is extended, adequately staffed and resourced without delay;
- Fully support the newly launched National Office for Suicide Prevention, and will assure the agency is adequately resourced to engage in mental health promotion across a range of organisations and targeted vulnerable groups.
The full policy can be downloaded from www.ciarancuffe.com
Fine Gael
Coming soon.
Fianna Fail
Coming soon.
Labour
Changing Our Mindset, Labour's Approach to Mental Health
Emotional and mental distress can be as debilitating and, at times, as life threatening as physical distress. Yet psychiatric illness does not receive the attention, investment and resources that go towards treating physical illness. It is time to change that mindset.
Despite the passing into law of the long overdue Mental Health Act, Mental Health is truly the Cinderella of Ireland’s health services. Receiving a smaller and smaller share of a cake that is not big enough to begin with, under-funded, unequally distributed, understaffed, lacking in essential specialist services, in short as neglected and ignored as many of its clients.
Report after report has highlighted this neglect, has pointed out how the most deprived areas of the country get the smallest mental health allocations, and has shown how the mentally ill in Ireland are still stigmatised and forgotten. They have also pointed out that, despite the proliferation of previous reports and despite many commitments:
- We still do not have properly resourced community care for our mentally ill,
- We still do not have properly constituted clinical teams to deal with these most vulnerable of people,
- We still do not have enough beds for certain specialities* – notably child and adolescent services; forensic services and services for eating disorders – while at the same our system remains far too bed-based with valuable resources tied up in bed provision, rather than community based services such as day hospitals, day centres, hostels, half-way houses, drop-in centres and properly staffed community mental health teams.
- We still do not have enough psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, therapists, nurses and back-up staff.
- We do not intervene early enough to make a real difference for those who develop serious mental illness.
In short, we do not have a near adequate mental health service in place to deal with the one in four of us who will experience significant mental health difficulties in our lifetime.
The World Health Organisation sets out general principles for mental health legislation to protect the rights of the mentally ill.
These include:- Respect for individuals and their social, cultural, ethnic, religious and philosophical values.
- Individuals' needs taken fully into account.
- Care and treatment provided in the least restrictive environment.
- Provision of care and treatment aimed at promoting each individual's self- determination and personal responsibility.
What follows is the Labour Party’s first steps towards establishing these principles in practice in Ireland. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Article 12, which has been ratified by Ireland, states that: 'All persons have the right to the best available mental health care' In the Tiger Economy Ireland of 2005 we are a long way from honouring our commitment under this convention. It’s time we started.
This content was sourced from the Labour Party Website
The full policy can be viewed from the Labour Party Website
The Progressive Democrats
Coming soon.
Sinn Fein
Coming soon.