UCC Welfare Officer Katie Quinlan has written a stirring open letter to Minister for Health Leo Varadkar over proposed cuts to the mental health budget in 2016.
Earlier this week it was announced that
€12m is to be taken from the budget this year, money that had been previously ringfenced to cover an issue that effects thousands and thousands of Irish people, both directly and indirectly.
Varadkar explained that the money had been earmarked for 1,550 new mental health staff across the country this year, a figure that became unrealistic.
Katie's letter, however, simply asks why the money wasn't directed into other areas around the treatment of mental health problems rather than removed entirely to cover other areas of the health spectrum.
This is a very strong message, and we're happy to support it.
It begins...
Dear Mr. Varadkar,
This week I have watched you disregard a significant portion of this country’s population in one swift cruel move.
This week I watched you, a Government official, blatantly do a 180 on a promise you made to various mental health charities and advocates in the past few months.
This week I have watched mental health issues develop a small hint of that stigma we’ve fought so hard to remove.
Counselling has saved my life.
That’s not an easy thing to say and that’s probably the first time I have ever admitted it. Medication has saved many of my friends. Talk therapy has saved members of my family. I don’t buy this whole “one in five suffer with mental health issues” statistic, I think everyone is fighting their own fight. Some of us just need more help.
Your decision to cut mental health funding tells those that need more help that they can’t have it. Those that get the courage and conviction to reach out are now at more of a risk of having their plea for help fall on deaf ears.
We’re a country that bows its heads and gets on with things. We’re Irish, we’re stubborn and we’re incessantly polite.
Now is the time we need to fight.
This fight isn’t to remove an extra charge on our weekly bills or to increase the money we receive each week, this fight is to save our siblings, parents and friends’ lives.
This fight is to tell the pathetic substitute we have for government that we will not allow them alienate the people we need to help most.
For long enough this country has behaved as if mental health issues do not exist. We’ve brushed it all under the carpet, sedated the conversation and hoped it would all go away.
Now that we’re having the open and frank conversation on mental health you want to rip the funding from services that do their utmost for those who need it.
Have you ever listened to someone plead with you to let them take their own life? Have you ever spent hours wishing you could just make it all go away, just make all the thoughts stop? Have you ever watched someone spend hours trying to figure out why they feel so desolate? Have you ever woken up to the news that your friend just couldn’t take it any more and decided to end it all?
I have. Both in my work and in my personal life.
I can’t and I won’t sit back while you take money from services are saving lives every single day.
I plead with you, Mr. Varadkar, don’t allow the message that “help isn’t available” spread to the people who need us most.
I don’t want to sit at another funeral because my government took money from the service that could have saved this person.
I don’t want to have to worry when I advise someone to present at their local emergency room when everything becomes too much.
Don’t bring us back 50 years to a place where mental health is a taboo and we all just bow our heads and get on with it.
