“Conall was a good lad, and he didn’t deserve that substandard care. This trauma will be with us for the rest of our lives”
Ticking Boxes (featuring Damien Dempsey & Gabor Maté)
A mum from Co Antrim is calling for mental health services in Northern Ireland to be reformed after the death of her son.
Mary Gould is working alongside PPR on the New Script for Mental Health campaign, and has spoken about all the boxes that had been ticked during her son’s “treatment”.
Her son, Conall, died in February 2017 at just 21 years old while under the care of their local health trust after his family sought treatment for him amid a mental health crisis. During his treatment, Mary said there was a lack of communication between different services, and no communication with family.
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At the start of this month, acclaimed singer-songwriter Damien Dempsey joined with families bereaved through mental health care failures to launch their new ‘Ticking Boxes’ music video. Alongside Damien Dempsey, the video features world renowned trauma expert and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté.
The song was written in response to Mary Gould’s experience of “box ticking” during her son’s treatment. Speaking to Belfast Live, she is calling for further accountability for mental health services to learn from past mistakes, to ensure preventable deaths do not occur.
She said: “It was quite a short illness in the sense he was really ill from autumn 2016, and he died in February 2017. He was only 21 years of age.
“He was discharged to the home treatment team in our local trust, then was admitted again before being discharged. A day or two after his discharge, he took off to his grandmother’s in England. They never said it was suicide, it was an accidental overdose, but he was really not well at all. That’s why he had gone back, because we were really worried about him.
“At that point, he was no longer under the care of the home treatment team, we had never been told they were never coming back in again. They didn’t really seem to know what they were doing, and didn’t know his history.”
Mary said her experience of the services was they were “haphazard.” She is calling for real reform of the system, not just a focus on “ticking boxes” in someone’s care.
“When my son was alive, I was calling out for help, and they weren’t listening. The Trust completely lacked the ability to safeguard his life. I found the system to be haphazard, almost like the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, they had a complete disregard for their own policies,” she explained.
“There was a lack of communication between inpatient services and outpatient services and there was literally no communication with family at all. Clearly that is not the way it should be – there needs to be accountability, there needs to be proper investigation and then there needs to be learning from that. No more ticking boxes.”
In October last year, New Script for Mental Health launched the ‘Give 5’ Framework which outlines a rights-based approach to mental health. They said this is in response to the Public Health Agency’s ‘Take 5 Steps to Wellbeing’ initiative, which focuses on individual actions to improve mental health.
Give 5 focuses on actions to be taken by government and organisations to improve the mental health system in Northern Ireland. It sets out a vision for a different way of thinking about and responding to people’s distress, with a strong focus on community, creativity, and choice. It is intended to put people back into the heart of systems, while holding government and organisations accountable.
Mary is calling for this framework to be taken on as a way to prevent any future preventable deaths in the system here. She said: “Conall was a good lad, and he didn’t deserve that substandard care. This trauma will be with me and my family for the rest of our lives.
“There is something very wrong about the mental health services in this country. I’m not going to stop, if there’s something I can do to do to keep my son’s name alive and make sure his death is not in vain, I will.
“Accountability is needed because when there are preventable deaths and no accountability, you do not learn from mistakes, so it will happen again to others.
“A lot of what PPR are doing is looking at different ways to help people with mental health difficulties, using things like art and community-based prescribing. I don’t think it would’ve helped my son as he was in a mental health crisis, but what it will do is free up places in services for the likes of Conall, if more people are getting support in the community.”
Anyone who needs to talk to someone about mental health issues can call the Samaritans on 116123 or Lifeline on 0808 808 8000.
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