Youth Mental Health and Guidance Services in Secondary Schools: Motion [Private Members]
Seanad Éireann — 2023-06-21
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Tom Clonan (IND), University of Dublin

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire Stáit. I was happy to sign Senator Garvey's motion. It is a great celebration and recognition of teachers and guidance counsellors, and the roles they play in our formation as teenagers and adolescents and the adults we have become, we hope.
In a previous life, between 2012 and 2022, I worked with the Mental Health Commission on mental health tribunals for people who are involuntarily detained. I do not mean to be reductive or disrespectful but for the first five years of that experience, I dealt with people who were in absolute crisis and were, on the whole and generally, older people with a history of psychiatric illness. Very often, because of circumstances, their conditions become treatment resistant or the patients are non-compliant with their medications. Very often, older adults are being minded by elderly parents and when the elderly parents die, that adult would go into crisis. Because such people's mental illness has never been diagnosed or treated, they are, by definition, treatment resistant.
In more recent years, I saw an increasing amount of young people in their early 20s at mental health tribunals. In many cases, often through polysubstance abuse, such young people had an acute psychotic episode.
In many cases, recovery is very difficult because that polysubstance abuse can cause organic changes to the structure of the brain or affect young people who have no family history of psychiatric illness. I found the results of this study disturbing. Approximately 40% of adolescents reported having experienced levels of depression outside the normal range and 49% had experienced levels of anxiety outside the normal range, while 6% stated they had made a suicide attempt, as opposed to experiencing just suicidal ideation. Those are frightening numbers, but they align with my experience on the mental health tribunals of the growing presentation of younger people. Obviously, substance abuse can be related to wider factors in the family, the community or the environment in which people find themselves. I fully support the motion.
I agree Covid has had an impact on young people as they go through the school system. My daughter finished sitting the leaving certificate yesterday and I am very familiar with her age cohort. She also passed her driving test in the previous week, so I will be walking and cycling to Leinster House for the foreseeable future. Similarly, my youngest fella finished sitting his junior certificate last week, and with his cohort and peer group, I can clearly see the impact Covid has had on their ability to socialise and relate to one another. This is a timely intervention, therefore. That cohort will push through but kids at primary school level, from junior infants to sixth class, have borne the brunt of Covid, with lockdowns and not being able to attend school or socialise with their peers. There is a developmental gap in that regard, not least in those early years. We might not automatically think of very young children as having been affected, but that is when all the rapid developmental progress takes place, and if it is interrupted, that can have long-term effects. This is a great initiative, therefore, and I am very happy to support it.
I would characterise my own school’s career guidance in the 1980s, when I was a student at the Christian Brothers school in Finglas, as rough and ready. My primary motivation in school was to get out of that environment as quickly as I could. Nevertheless, I had teachers who played a huge role, whom I recall even now, 30 or 40 years later. I would support anything, therefore, that helps support that community. I hear the concerns expressed about guidance counsellors not being mental health counsellors, but there is an important pastoral component to what teachers do. They are, by definition and legally, in loco parentis , so they do parent and there are mechanisms in school for referring students who are in trouble to other allied professionals, so I would not be concerned about that but rather welcome it. I hope the Minister of State will be able to go to Cabinet and say we have restored the ex-quota status of guidance counsellors in all secondary schools, whereby hours will be calculated on the basis of the number of students in the school, and reduced the ratio of full-time guidance counsellors in order to increase the number of guidance counsellors available to our students. Those timely interventions will have considerable value in the lives of young people, especially in this post-Covid era.

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Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:02+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-06-21