Madam, - The tragedy of suicide, and its scale, have been very prominent in recent times. All the evidence, and the advice of experts, point to the urgent necessity for a comprehensive mental health promotion strategy, and Amnesty welcomes that such a national strategy is currently being produced.
Information and support for children, parents, and teachers in identifying emotional and behavioural problems, and early intervention services and programmes, as promised in the National Children's Strategy, are also urgently required.
It is essential that the Government - and most immediately the Minister for Health and Children - give this the highest priority. We are all aware that the Minister has an enormous task trying to put an efficient structure on a health service that appears to be constantly in chaos. However, mental health has been pushed further and further down the priority list over the past 15 years, and its percentage of the health budget has been consistently dropping. More money is not the answer to the long years of neglect of mental health, but it is certainly part of the answer. At present mental health receives just 7 per cent of the health budget; in the UK the equivalent figure is 12 per cent, and is considered inadequate.
We all have a fundamental human right to the highest attainable standard of mental health, and our State has guaranteed under international law to deliver on this right. By any measure, the Irish State has failed - and failed badly. Mental health problems are not as visible as other medical concerns or disabilities. No doubt also, the absence of a strong lobbying voice for this highly vulnerable sector has compounded the problem. But consider that,among 15- to 44-year-olds of both sexes, disability arising from unipolar depressive disorders account on their own for more than the combined disabilities arising from asthma, HIV/AIDS, road traffic accidents, and alcohol/drug use disorders.
Whether or not suicide is at epidemic proportions, as stated by a coroner in Offaly recently, the damage being done to individuals, to families, to society, to the economy, by the neglect of mental health is inestimable. In January the Government signed up to the WHO Helsinki Mental Health Declaration for Europe. In this it promises to "provide fair and adequate financial resources" for mental health. Will this be another empty gesture? - Yours, etc,
SEAN LOVE, Executive Director, Amnesty International (Irish Section), Fleet Street, Dublin 2.