Please have your say on EU plans for mental health

national | eu | news report Thursday December 01, 2005 17:28 by Kathy Sinnott

"At the end of the day, is this going to help someone?" That's what I found myself wondering as I waited my turn to speak at a seminar in Brussels on Europe's upcoming mental health strategy.

The discussion document is predictable. You can read it online at:

http://europa.eu.int/comm/health/ph_determinants/life_style/mental/green_paper/consultation_en.htm

Up to now the strategy has been formulated by 'experts', or what is known as key stakeholders. With the publication of the Green paper on mental health, the 'expert' stage is over. The future strategy is now at its most important stage - public consultation. This is our stage, our chance to influence the strategy.

Please join me. Send them your story of mental ill health, its causes, struggles and treatments. Send your experiences of services, or lack of them. Those with a story of recovery or prevention, please share it. Don't hold back, they need to know that the depression of a 35-year old woman can lift, that the death of a teenager from suicide could have been avoided. They need to fully grasp the pain of the person who has a mental illness and the implications for the person's family before they finalise the Strategy for Mental Health. I will tell them what kept me from the brink of depression at the most stressful times in my life and I will tell them how some of that stress could have been avoided.

When I study the Green paper and come across a list like "targets, benchmarks, timeliness..." on the one hand I appreciate the need for a business-like approach to mental health. On the other hand, I despair and wonder if the busy lifestyle we have all adopted is part of what is driving the increase in rates and severity of mental ill health.

When you write your submission to the EU Commission, I am sure you will say that you want good quality services and where and when you need them. Some of you will be able to relate good stories of such services but some of you will have horror stories to tell that come from lack of services or from an experience of services that are heavy-handed and interfering.

Where you have had a good experience of psychiatric drugs tell them, but I hope you won't be shy of highlighting problems of lack of support around drug regimes, over-reliance on drugs and inappropriate prescribing of drugs including dangerous or experimental ones.

If you have benefited from people to people groups like GROW, hopefully you will describe the benefits and the elements like sharing, listening, the 12-step program or other organically developed programs that produced those benefits. I certainly will.

People might tell the EU Commission about the help they receive from diets, from eliminating foods that trigger symptoms and including foods and supplements that make them feel better. Hopefully, people who have come to mental illness through addictions like drug, alcohol, gambling and pornography will share their experience. Hopefully, some will be able to share not just the suffering but how they have regained mental health.

Share research with the Commission. Don't assume they have seen it. Forward the studies on exam stress, isolation in older people,heavy metal toxicity and behaviour change, schizophrenia and dairy free diets and research on teen sexual activity as a trigger for depression.

Maybe someone will join me in asking the Commission to take a special look at the risk factors for mental illness in persons who experience some types of disabilties. And maybe I will tell them that as a mother of a big family, and one member with severe disability, it was not the offered four sessions of State-sponsored counselling I needed to ward off depression, but services for my son. In other words, we don't always need to directly address the exhaustion or threatening depression but to eliminate causes. We will then see people recovering spontaneously.

If we all participate, my hope is that the Commission will realise that for people to stay mentlly healthy, the need for time, friends, family, beliefs and the love and nurturing that goes with these and that we are squeezing these out with our profit-driven, globalised EU economic strategy.

If they learn this, they will produce an EU Mental Health Strategy that will help someone.