Tag Archives: psychiatric care

This morning.

Robert Brady in the Irish Examiner, writes:

I am 19 years old and have spent 15 months in a psychiatric unit in Dublin. I was admitted as an involuntary patient.

There, I received a diagnosis of schizophrenia. I was on my own when I received this news as I was unable to see family due to Covid. To this day, I find it hard to believe. I was told I was extremely unwell.

My path was long and gruesome until medication could be found that was suitable and worked to get me stable. I was told my next step would be intense rehabilitation after being in hospital so long and due to the illness I lost all my skills.

My memory was affected and a referral to one of the only two inpatient rehabilitation centres in Ireland was made by my team.

I was then made a voluntary patient and I awaited my rehabilitation acceptance but bad news came. They refused me as I was not chronic enough in my mental illness for the programme.

My illness is lifelong, and my hopes were dashed. I was discharged back to my community. My days are spent lying around my house.

I feel that for young people like me we could be given a chance of a better outcome for our future if we had rehabilitation beds.

I am at lost how to handle this diagnosis I have been given and would like to be in a rehabilitation unit where I could gain independence, living skills, and the tools to help me live the best life possible with my illness.

Robert Brady
Walkinstown
Dublin 12

Irish Examiner Letters

Pic: HSE

Cloverhill Prison

Your editorial (July 10th) on the lack of accommodation for forensic psychiatric patients must be welcomed, in so far as any mention is better than none at all.

However, by simultaneously drawing attention to the generic areas of “mental health issues” and “mental health problems”, you manage to fudge (not for the first time in your paper) the core difficulty.

This remains the failure, at the highest level, to prioritise the treatment of patients with severe and enduing mental illness.

Hence the scandal of inadequate State provision for persons who are acutely mentally ill, whether in prison or elsewhere.

The reasons for this failure are many and complex.

However, semantic confusion also plays its part, and it is regrettable to find Ireland’s leading newspaper being so beguiled.

Michael Mulcahy,
Consultant Psychiatrist,
Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.

Acute mental illness services (The Irish Times letters page)

Rollingnews