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Matthew Taylor is a local 23 year mental health campaigner from Belfast. In 2023, 221 people took their own lives in Northern Ireland. I almost became one of them. Admitted to a psychiatric ward from July-December in a state of crisis, I witnessed an overstretched, exhausted and often inconsistent health service that was fighting to keep its head above water. I experienced both profound kindness and stigma from staff, with some telling me “if you really wanted to kill yourself, we couldn’t stop you”, while others called me selfish, attention-seeking, ‘unwilling to engage’. The truth is, I was none of those things, I was just ill, in a system unsuitable to provide the level of care patients deserve. One night, while I lay crying on the floor of the ward clutching a suicide note, a nurse took it from me and left me there. This story is not just mine, it mirrors the experiences of the dozens of patients and young people I have spoken to over the last three years. Last w, in light of this crisis facing our services, the Executive chose to mark World Mental Health Day, not with support, but by indefinitely cutting 80% of the actions from our mental health strategy, admitting that the majority of work to date had “primarily focused on preparatory activities rather than tangible impact for service users.” Recognising that 15 of the 35 actions within the strategy were yet to begin at all, responsibility lie’s both with the Department of Health to allocate resources to prioritise service delivery, and the Executive as a whole for the reality that only £12.3 million had been allocated to 14 actions within the strategy by the end of 2024/25, representing just 16% of the funding deemed necessary for implementing the Strategy in that period. Facing a crisis in our workforce, we have not expanded our level of psychiatrist training places since 2007, with counselling services for primary school pupils scrapped following an 18-month pilot. A report commenced by Stormont’s Public Accounts Committee in 2024 also highlighted failures by the Department of Health to adequately prepare the data and networks necessary to ensure the successful implementation of the Strategy, noting that officials developed the new mental health strategy “despite having little data on the outcomes of services for patients, no strategic data on the workforce needed within the statutory sector and limited data on services in the voluntary and community sector.” Data in mental health is significantly limited and mistakenly focused on activity being undertaken, rather than on the impact services are making for patients, with opportunities for patients to provide feedback on services still primarily paper-based, rather than utilising online methods. In my own case, shockingly upon discharge from the psychiatric ward, I was provided with a paper feedback form that I had no way of returning, as I no longer had access to the ward. The Mental Health Strategy, though undoubtedly suffering from limited investment, began its work on uneven foundations of institutional failure by officials from the very outset. Our Health Minister is right to express his “personal disappointment” at the state of our mental health services, but he is mistaken to describe the scaling back of the Mental Health Strategy as a “sharpening of our focus to maximise impact within the resources available.” Rather, the dilution of our Mental Health Strategy will only be understood by patients like me, struggling with severe mental health conditions, as our Executive’s chief political failure, and a comprehensive betrayal of our most vulnerable citizens. In a political environment wholly deficient of trust in our institutions to deliver and make our lives better, it is equally disappointing that departmental officials did not make allowances for the possibility that funding could be under-resourced, particularly against a backdrop of a Stormont Executive that has historically only functioned for 65% of its lifespan. Our public services are not overstretched, they are now fundamentally broken and unsuitable for use. Instead of choosing to maximise a necessary investment to improve outcomes for our most vulnerable, the Executive’s dereliction of duty has merely reiterated our greatest fears, that the lights in Stormont might now finally be on, but nobody’s really home.
