Liam Quaide

And what should happen then is that you're seen by a number of professionals on that team and

whether, you know, you're assessed as needing potentially, you know, psychotherapy, perhaps you need family support from a social worker, you might need help to kind of, you know, get more of a routine and structure in your day through OT support.

And likewise, that should be happening in these inpatient settings.

What is happening in reality is that people are turning up, they're being seen in psychiatric clinics where there's doctors on rotation, you know, they're seeing a different

psychiatrists each time they're having to retell their stories.

There's very little therapeutic input.

They're being asked a whole series of questions around risk to self and others in a very kind of tick-boxing way.

And that's increasingly the way inpatient mental health care is developing as well.

So it's very retrograde.

Yes, and that's a whole other level of, you know,

a lack of trauma-informed care and being in a highly stressed environment, a place where you're actually likely to become, you know, much more destabilised and distressed.

So, you know, and that's coming back again to what the unions told us at that Health Committee, that there's just a pervasive level of understaffing across the board and that is leaving staff in an invidious position of just not being able to provide adequate care to people.

For sure, yeah.

And, you know, we need...

much more like what can often happen as well in general mental health services is that people who have alcohol dependency or drug dependency are often kind of crudely shut out because they're seen as having an addiction that has nothing to do with mental health and we need much more flexible working in that regard because they're often you know people who are in some of the most vulnerable states and can be very vulnerable to homelessness for instance as well if they're not treated

That's right, yeah.

Usually...

usually a mental health team won't accept a referral except from a GP.

And I think that's wise that there's a single pathway.

Sometimes a person can come from another mental health team, but that's not usually the case.