Suicide rates in jails have been falling due to greater awareness of prisoners' needs, according to the governor of Mountjoy. Carl O'Brien reports.
Mr John Lonergan told a conference on suicide at the weekend that small but significant steps, such as improved psychiatric services, methadone maintenance and screening of vulnerable prisoners, had helped to bring the numbers of deaths down.
"There is a far greater awareness that people going to prison are at risk and the statistics show there has been a reduction," he said. "When I took over Mountjoy in the mid-1980s there were around seven deaths a year in the service. That's down to around three a year now."
The key to keeping suicide rates low in prisons was changing society's attitudes towards prisoners rather than appointing more health professionals.
"It's about how we relate to people. We indicate to prisoners, through our attitudes, that they are not up to our standards, that they are a disgrace. We tend to overreact to people who make mistakes. If you have that label on your forehead, that is very difficult. There is hopelessness and stigmatisation," he said.
"I don't believe the answer is more psychotherapists or psychologists." He said people needed to give more time to their day-to-day relationships.
Former Garda sergeant Mr Michael Egan told the conference of new training which gardaí are receiving to help families cope with the suicide of a loved one. He said gardaí had learned from mistakes and were more sensitive in the manner in which families were informed of a suicide.
This included allowing family members determine how much information they wanted, having access to accurate information regarding the death and having two gardaí - preferably male and female - calling to the family of a person who had died by suicide.
Prof Kevin Malone, the scientific director of the 3Ts charity, dedicated to "turning the tide of suicide", announced details of an all-Ireland survey of people who had lost someone to suicide.
He said the survey, to be conducted over the next 18 months, was aimed at shedding new light on what was happening in the minds of people who took their own lives.
"There is a big knowledge gap regarding who these people were, what was going on in their social or professional lives," he said.
"We have to close this gap and close it in a hurry. There are people out there with vital information."