IRELAND is facing a wave of mental health issues in children “like we’ve never seen before” in the aftermath of the pandemic, a leading child psychologist has claimed.
More than 10,000 children are currently on a HSE waiting list for mental health treatment with more than 4,000 of these kids waiting over a year for a psychology appointment.
Ireland’s psychology waiting list problem has grown to unprecedented levels in recent years with senior paediatric clinical psychologist Dr Claire Crowe telling the Irish Sun: “This is about as scary as it gets.”
Dr Crowe said she has seen children wait up to four years to see a psychologist and warned that patients are now presenting with conditions that require complex and costly care but could have been solved easily if they had received treatment quickly.
She said: “There is no psychological issue that is not impacted and made more clinically critical by a delay in intervention. Every psychologist is seeing that and knows that.
“With a delay in access for treatment, I know I’m going to have a much more complicated case on my hands and I’m going to need a more intensive intervention which will of course lead to more delays.
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“Psychologists train for the guts of a decade and they have extensive understanding of developmental trajectory so they are keenly aware of the damage caused by delays and we’re concerned.
“As much as parents are concerned, we are deeply concerned because we know the long term impacts.”
Dr Crowe told the Irish Sun that the pandemic has thrown up new mental health challenges for children with conditions like OCD being compounded by Covid-19 measures such as hand washing and sanitising.
PANDEMIC IMPACT
The child psychology expert explained: “We could have predicted this at the start of the pandemic that the next wave of the pandemic would be the psychological crisis and that’s where we are now.
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“We’ve moved away from health being the focus but it really is mental health and I suppose the difficulty is that there are all those things that were maybe created by the pandemic.
“That health anxiety is the thing that has been really exacerbated in the pandemic, that’s what we see in kids now.
“But actually there’s all the other issues that are always there that have become compounded because kids haven’t been seen.”
WAITING LISTS
The Psychological Society of Ireland have urged the Government to address the serious issue of waiting lists for children with Dr Crowe claiming that even private psychologists are starting to close waiting lists because they are too long.
She said: “If you search for private psychology, a lot of them have just closed wait lists. They don’t even have a wait list that you can go on.
“They’re not offering a wait list because the demand has never been like it is right now.
“There’s 4,000 members in the Psychological Society of Ireland and this is the reports we’re getting. This is about as scary as it gets.”
NEED LARGER COURSES
Dr Crowe believes the Government needs to increase the number of clinical psychologists being trained in Ireland with 100 new professionals graduating every year.
She said: “The clinical programme at the moment is about 15 and there’s no reason why that classroom size can’t be doubled to 30.
“It’s the same resource when you think about it. Those lecturers who come in to talk to 15 can come in and talk to 30.
“And the demand is certainly there. People are vying to get into these courses. There are hundreds of people every year who don’t get into these courses.”
Dr Crowe has also called on the Government to address the cost of training as a psychologist which can run to €14,000 per year with education and counselling trainees not being paid for their work experience during the training.
Due to not being paid during training placements, Dr Crowe says some would-be psychologists are being offered places in education and counselling courses but are not taking them because they can’t afford them.
