Mental Health Bill 2024: Committee Stage (Resumed)
Seanad Éireann — 2025-12-09
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Mary Butler (FF), Waterford

Amendments Nos. 15 to 17, inclusive, relate to the definition of "mental disorder" and propose to replace it with a definition of "psychosocial disability" or "mental health difficulty". We spent a lot of time debating this in the Dáil. I had expected to debate it again here tonight. I have spent a great deal of time considering this issue and have consulted widely on the term involved. I do not intend to accept amendments Nos. 15 and No. 17, and I will set out the reasons why.
We forget that the Covid pandemic spanned 2020, 2021 and 2022. I often remember thinking that it was great that people were speaking so openly about their mental health, their mental health challenges and their mental health difficulties. I will remember watching "The Late Late Show" one Friday night. This was at a time when you could not go more than 5 km from your house. A man on the programme said his mental health was affected because the pub was closed. I said to myself, a lot of things might drive my emotional well-being. A lot of times you have a really busy day and your emotional well-being can be under pressure. You might have a very busy day in the Dáil - as Chief Whip and Minister of State with responsibility for mental health, for example, on your feet for almost 12 hours at this stage. As another example, you might face a situation where something has gone wrong in work or something has gone wrong with your relationships or your housing. There are myriad reasons, and that could affect you. I always say, and we say down in Waterford, that could throw you out of kilter. It might mean that your mental health or your emotional well-being is not where it should be. However, does that mean you have a mental health disorder? No, it certainly does not. That is why I have thought long and hard about this.
I will read something into the record of the Seanad. I spoke in the Dáil the night we were discussing this. The majority of Senators will know Deputy Martin Daly, who is a GP. I was really struck by what he said the evening when we were debating this wording. I got the transcript of his comments. Dr. Daly said:
We have a very low rate of involuntary admission compared to other jurisdictions, most especially the UK, which is our closest neighbour. It is a really serious step for any practitioner in the community to involuntarily admit someone. This is based on my 35-year experience as a GP.
I will be criticised for having a good working relationship with the college of psychiatry, for example, with psychologists or with the Psychiatric Nurses Association, but I was really struck by Deputy Daly's comments. This is a general practitioner of 35 years' experience working in a rural area, and he said that. He continued:
The situations where we have admitted people to hospital involuntarily are those where someone is psychotically ill - usually with schizophrenia, bipolar manic depressive disorder or acute psychotic episode. Thankfully, there are some acute psychotic episodes that are related to stress and people do ... well once there is early intervention but to widen the terminology to psychosocial disability would do something we thought we had left behind us. I think of how 40 or 50 years ago, we put people into psychiatric units who should never have been there for a range of reasons. Psychosocial covers a myriad of things from social behaviour to personality disorder and addiction issues. We have moved on from that. There must be a high bar for involuntary admission. I believe practitioners in the community apply a high bar to it for the very reason that it is an enormous step to detain someone, take away their liberty and involuntarily admit them to a psychiatric institution.
I was really struck by the Deputy's words that night. When any of us are sick, our first port of call is our GP working in the community day and night to support people. Earlier in the same debate, Deputy Daly stated:
Trying to come up with language that pleases everyone is difficult, but the terms "mental health difficulties" and "psychosocial disability" are too broad for some of the conditions we are talking about. My understanding of the term "mental health disorder" is someone who has a clinically diagnosed condition that is persistent and causing ongoing disability for that person. We are talking about people with schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder, or with persistent anxiety and depression. "Mental health difficulties" is just too broad a term. It encompasses things that may well be transient that affect mental well-being or health. For example, if people have a bad day or are stressed, that is a mental health difficulty. They might feel better tomorrow because they had a good night's sleep. I do not want to trivialise this, but we need to give weight to psychotic conditions where people are seriously ill or to people who have neurotic conditions with severe persistent symptoms that are dysfunctional. We have to give way to that. At this time, "mental disorder" is ... the best term.
I have asked Members to come up with another term that we feel is more appropriate, but I have not come across it yet. I fervently believe there has to be a distinction between mental health difficulties and conditions that can be treated in the community and on a voluntary basis, and then conditions classified as mental disorders in the Bill, which can be the cause of an involuntary admission.
It should also be noted that the term "disorder" is used frequently elsewhere in healthcare and in mental healthcare, such as in relation to eating disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, respiratory disorders and autism spectrum disorder. "Disorder" is a valid, frequent-use term throughout healthcare.
Government amendment No. 16 corrects a typographical error that needs to be fixed.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2025-12-09/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:26+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-09