The Politics of Mental Health
Last wednesday I attended a very interesting meeting organised by UCD Equality Society which brought together speakers from Headstrong, Amnesty Ireland and the Irish Mental Health Coalition. (I was a bit late, so there may have been others too).I cannot imagine a similar meeting happening when I was an undergraduate of UCD 20 years ago. The stigma of mental illness is beginning to show some small cracks at least. By far the most inspiring contribution of the night came from one of the Headstrong advisory panel, a young student who summed up the failings of the bio-medical quite expertly. Her contribution exemplified empowerment, courage and honesty.
On a macro policy level, mental health remains starved of resources in Ireland. As Tony Bates remarked, it is often a case of finding help only because the sufferer has already entered into the Justice system. Tony hopes that the new A Vision for Change strategy will be implemented and resourced, rather than collect dust. He also encouraged parents and communities to become more reponsible and empowered to act themselves.
The issue of accountability to service users and the public came up again and again.
The most interesting level for me however was the socio-cultural level. The most obscuring thing about mental health diagnosis is that it is relentlessly individualistic, paying only the most tokenistic of lip service to the social factors involved in producing distress and symptoms.
Let's hope we are beginning to see a shift towards a more emotionally literate society, if that is the right term.
Just discovered the following report on this meeting on the headstrong site:
posted by Daniel @ Tuesday, May 01, 2007
