Kerry CAMHS travesty

Dear Editor,

It’s disturbing to note that the predominant professional responses circulating to date on the disturbing tragedy of the South Kerry CAMHS travesty are all from an ingrained defensive biomedical perspective. Their collective protective professional ‘camouflage’ bemoans funding strictures at length rather than finger the blatant reality that a qualified medical doctor, with prior adult mental health experience, perpetrated such damage in total contravention of the prime Hippocratic ethic which is supposed to underline their profession’s core raison d’etre.

The diagnostic, prescriptive and record-keeping failures by this doctor would be drastically unbecoming of even a 1st year medical student. Even a Transitional Year pupil at secondary school could have done better. Circling the wagons to criticise funding shortfalls is such a pathetic response to this unforgivable saga.

Of course the routine pre-emptive rush to prescribe psychotropic medication in life-distress scenarios has been an ongoing indefensible travesty for years and continually exposes the all too pervasive dominance of ‘ biomedicalia’ in this zone of healthcare. The needless, and regularly prolonged, swamping of distressed people with dubious drug regimens is, sadly, a universal issue, with Ireland shamefully featuring as a prime perpetrator in this regard.

The ‘ brain-chemical imbalance’ notional theory which infests and infects all diagnostic templates currently invoked, is simply a redundant fallacy which unfortunately still rules the roost in such assessments. The ‘ medicalising’ of these challenging emotional/ behavioural scenarios proffers only a distorted camouflaging take on the actual deeper traumas at play within the person involved.

In one of the cases highlighted elsewhere, the old adage that ‘mother knows best’ came flying home to roost true. Eventually the frustrated mother took recourse to dropping all medication and seeking a creative psychodynamic exploratory appraisal via Art Therapy, which significantly helped reveal key issues far from the ‘ madding’ medication. The vested-interest professional hierarchy extant in this healthcare zone is inexorably tilted towards medication, whereas there are so many other creative psychodynamic therapeutic approaches abounding which can offer valuable validity and effective mitigation.

Having worked as a clinical Music Therapist for many years in various mental health units across the age range in London and Dublin, I can certainly attest to the ongoing urgent need to overhaul the core complexion of healthcare responses to life-distress issues across the board, and steer away from the unhelpful over-indulgence in the prescription pad. The time for detrimental deferential obsequiousness to the erstwhile stagnant status-quo has long since expired and should be banished for good... for the good of all concerned.

Yours etc., Jim Cosgrove, Clinical Music Therapist, Chapel Street, Lismore, Co. Waterford.