Seanad candidate and social worker Eoin Barry has said that Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services should be equipped to offer talk therapy interventions to any patient who comes into the service.
Barry is Chair of the CAMHS Special Interest Group in the Irish Association of Social Workers. He was speaking on RTÉ Radio One’s Drivetime in response to the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) telling an Oireachtas committee that underfunding of CAMHS was a key factor in major shortfalls by the service in south Kerry.
Barry said: “The Kerry report highlighted the risk of a psychiatrist operating without a consultant supervising.”
The review found that over 200 children being treated by a CAMHS junior doctor had been exposed to the risk of significant harm through the doctor’s diagnoses and treatment of them. There was no system to check the prescribing of medications or the quality of service by the junior doctor’s supervisors.
Barry added that “there’s a huge benefit to a variety of different talk therapies. Say, for example, in anorexia nervosa, that, generally speaking, is treated through family therapy or systemic therapy. We would say that talk therapy should be available for every young person that comes through the service, no matter where they’re living”.
“That requires a very consistent approach to training teams”, he said, explaining that consistent training would mean “no matter where you go, you can ensure that you’re going to get the correct therapy for the presenting problem”.
Responding to a question about the shortage of social workers in Ireland, Barry said that working in CAMHS is an “appealing” and “rewarding” job for a social worker: “Part of the problem for social workers is the amount of recruiting that’s going on.”
There are, however, “huge gaps”, he added. “There may not be a principal social worker covering three or four counties.”
“If you look at the American position, social workers are the most common profession in mental health services … social workers are a key part of the mental health treatment.”
He continued: “One of the key findings in that report was that they were essentially saying that CAMHS is accepting too many cases … what happens to the young people that don’t get offered the service?”
“If a doctor or somebody involved in their care believes they need support for their mental health … they should be provided with something. At the moment there’s this ad hoc system where there’s a great variety in funding streams, there’s different services being funded in different areas.”
