SPEECH BY PRESIDENT MARY MCALEESE AT THE COLLEGE OF PSYCHIATRY OF IRELAND’S INTL WINTER CONFERENCE
SPEECH BY PRESIDENT MARY MCALEESE AT THE COLLEGE OF PSYCHIATRY OF IRELAND’S INTERNATIONAL WINTER CONFERENCE
Tá an-áthas orm bheith i bhur láthair ar an ocáid seo. Tá mé buíoch díbh as an cuireadh agus an fáilte fíorchaoin a chur sibh romham. It’s good to be here in Croke Park at the College of Psychiatry of Ireland’s International Winter Conference, the first international conference to take place since the College was established on the 1st of January this year. I would particularly like to thank Dr. Justin Brophy for inviting me and indeed congratulate all those involved in organising the Conference and bringing it to our capital city. A special Irish cead mile failte, one hundred thousand welcomes, to our overseas delegates. I hope these days in Dublin will give you fresh new insights to inspire your vocation and your ongoing work, new and renewed friendships and professional networks and good memories of Ireland and its hospitality. I often come to Croke Park for major sporting events for as many of you will know, it is the home of Ireland national games and one of the world’s most successful amateur sporting organisations the Gaelic Athletic Association. It is an organisation that is rooted deeply in the community and earlier this year I was in this same place to launch a new GAA social initiative aimed at addressing the social isolation and mental well-being of older men in rural Ireland. I know that mental well-being is your vocation, your passion. It is what brings you here to this conference to share experience, research, wisdom, best practice, to try to fill out the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle we need to solve in order to bridge the new frontiers and face the challenges of contemporary mental health care.
We gather here in a phase of pervasive, high levels of anxiety and worry about the economy. With appalling suddenness and severity, a buoyant economy with almost full employment has given way to a recession, considerable job loss, negative equity among home owners, reductions in salaries and values of pensions, disappearance of share dividend income and share value, failed and failing businesses and a litany of hard to digest bad news. Our story is not unique for many of our foreign visitors will have similar experiences and while we work to rebuild our economy and know that we will in time do precisely that, there is this harsh no-man’s land in between the old and new frontiers. There, the fall-out from the recession has provoked added or new burdens which are now sorely testing the coping skills and the emotional resilience of individuals, families and communities. Many of you who work in the field of mental health care will know at first hand the downstream consequences of these pressures long before the statistical analysis catches up. You will know from past research what kind of impact we can expect to find among the various cohorts and constituencies most deeply affected. You will also know only too well how big a barrier to accessing proper help and services arises from the continuing stigma and taboo around acknowledging mental health problems. You also know that even without a recession, your work would continue unabated for chronic and acute mental health problems arise in the course of everyday life and there are any amount of things which place individuals at risk of mental illness whether for a short or long period.
We rely on your professional skill to help us build the individual and societal bulwarks which can prevent mental ill health in the first place. We rely on your professional skill to help rebuild lives that have become affected by mental ill health. We rely on you to teach us what you know so that we can grow in knowledge and not in stigmatisation, so that we can promote positive mental health awareness and positive, helpful attitudes to mental health difficulties. You can help us as individuals and as a society not to make things worse for ourselves and for others.
We all know the saying ‘your health is your wealth’ and there is a manifestly huge interest in, as well as an avalanche of information about, physical health and fitness, sensible diet and sport. Mental health though clearly a vital aspect of our overall physical well-being is so often the Cinderella issue and yet as we know from the self-harm and suicide statistics, there is a bleak landscape of mental suffering that we need to colonise with meaningful and accessible help and prevention strategies. This is not a job for mental health professionals alone for so often you are not the first port of call for someone with a problem. It may be a friend, family member or a trusted adult who is the conduit through which your services are eventually accessed and so civic society, as family and community to one another has a very powerful role to play in how well or badly we deal with mental health issues.
As the old Irish proverb says “Ar scáth a cheile a mhaireann na daoine” – “we live in one another’s shelter”. More openness, greater understanding and awareness are the keys to changing attitudes about mental health across society. Cicero once wrote that “diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body.” It is so essential that those facing mental ill-health are not confronted with a wall of silence, exclusion and shame which may inhibit the accessing of help and drive towards deeper isolation. The new frontier we are aiming for has to be a place where mental health services and mental ill-health are as comfortable a part of everyday discourse as any other mainstream health care issue or illness. We know we are not there yet but with the investment you are making here in Dublin and in your everyday work, the bridges towards that better new frontier are gradually being constructed. There is another Irish expression which says that two shortens the road so let us hope that your deliberations here shorten the road for all of us to that new and healthier frontier.
I wish you all continued success and personal as well as professional fulfilment in your vitally important work. Go raibh míle maith agaibh.