RELOCATING THE Central Mental Hospital (CMH) to the new Thornton Hall prison complex will criminalise mental illness and is the "worst case scenario", a new report to be published next week will claim.
The report, entitled Patients Not Prisoners, has called for the decision to be scrapped and the CMH retained on a smaller site in its present location in Dundrum, south Dublin.
The report has been prepared by several organisations including the Central Mental Hospital Carers' Group, the Irish Mental Health Coalition and Schizophrenia Ireland. It will be launched next Tuesday at Buswells Hotel.
The report proposes selling 14 acres of the 34-acre site of the current CMH complex. Land in the area is at a premium because of the Luas and the proximity of the Dundrum Town Centre.
It estimates that €140 million could be realised by selling the land. This would be enough to build a new CMH facility on the same site at an estimated cost of €100 million.
The present facility was built in 1850 and has been criticised in several international reports for having inadequate facilities.
The proposal to relocate the Central Mental Hospital to the Thornton Hall complex was first made when the Thornton Hall site was chosen as the location for the so-called new "super-prison" in January 2005.
There has been widespread opposition to the relocation proposal from groups as disparate as Amnesty International, The Irish Penal Reform Trust, Aware, the Psychiatric Nurses Association and Inclusion Ireland.
Unlike the prison complex, relocating the Central Mental Hospital will need planning permission and there are likely to be strenuous objections when it is submitted to Fingal County Council for approval.
The report has arisen out of a round table conference that was held earlier this year and which was attended by mental health experts at the Mansion House in Dublin.
In the report, Prof Paul Mullen, the professor of forensic psychiatry at Monash University, Australia, said locating a secure hospital beside a prison facility did not follow best international practice.
Also writing in the report, Jim Power, the chief economist with Friends First, said the move made no economic sense and the proposed move to Thornton Hall was not based on a cost-benefit analysis and no other options were considered.
He also warned that much of the mental health expertise, which was built up at the CMH, would be lost if its current employees decided not to relocate to Thornton Hall which is to be built at an isolated greenfield site in north county Dublin.
Schizophrenia Ireland group's director, John Saunders, said the relocation made no sense when other options were available.
"The purpose of forensic mental healthcare is to provide a therapeutic environment for people and to do so in the context of a secure environment if they need it," he commented.
"That is quite distinct from penalising people who have committed crime in a penal system. There are obvious distinctions in what you are trying to achieve.
"The evidence around the world has been that, where you site forensic mental health services as satellites of penal systems, the inevitable culture of the penal system overshadows and overtakes smaller forensic mental healthcare services. You get that transformation from a therapeutic environment to one that is primarily custodial and secure."
