Higgins says mental health goal is recovery

BOUNDARIES AND antipathies between professionals who treated people with mental health problems were getting in the way of people’s recovery, President Michael D Higgins has said.

Speaking at the second national conference of the Irish Council for Psychotherapy in Dublin yesterday, he said it caused him “great distress” to hear continuing debates about whether it was correct to focus on treating the brain (with medication) or the mind (with counselling).

“What is important is the human experience of the person in front of you,” he said.

The conference also heard calls for the inclusion of psychotherapists and counsellors in forthcoming legislation to regulate the standards and qualifications of some health professionals.

Mr Higgins said he “completely” agreed with the argument put forward by another speaker, Prof Renos Papadopoulos, director of the Centre for Trauma, Asylum and Refugees at the University of Essex.

Prof Papadopoulos said victims of trauma should be treated within a framework that addressed all facets of the person and did “not focus exclusively on the psychological or psychiatric dimensions of the person”. “The issue of access to listening must not be a casualty to institutional or professional boundaries,” said the President. He also spoke of the continued stigma around mental ill-health.

“Many mentally ill people are still the victims of uninformed or distorted ideas that can lead to discrimination . . . which can in turn exacerbate mental health difficulties.”

Dan Neville TD, president of the Irish Association of Suicidology, said it was “critical” that vulnerable people in crisis were not further damaged by counsellors or psychotherapists who were not properly trained. Currently, he said, any person could say they were a counsellor and charge €80 per hour.

He said the Health and Social Care Professionals Act 2005, which governs the qualifications and standards of professions in the health service, should also cover psychotherapists and counsellors. It is to be amended in a Bill due before Cabinet in coming weeks.

Mr Neville said he had been told that 12 other professional organisations must be fully designated “before psychotherapists and counsellors are included in the Act. I do not accept this. The inclusion of psychotherapists and counsellors is critical to vulnerable people in crisis,” he said.