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WE ARE ALL potential users of mental health services. The question is how would we like to be treated if we found ourselves in this situation?
Under current Irish mental health legislation, people experiencing severe mental distress are at high risk of being denied the right to make decisions about their treatment, deprived of their liberty, and having their human rights violated.
This is at odds with the United Nations, World Health Oganization and international best practices. The real tragedy is that people are still having their human rights violated and not getting the support they want in the Irish mental health system.
At the moment, members of the Oireachtas are working through proposed changes to the Mental Health Act after the Government approved the draft heads of a Bill of amendments to the legislation.
Human rights approach
The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities requires us to move to a human rights-based approach in line with WHO guidance. This is an obligation, not a choice. The World Psychiatric Association has recently made important steps in this direction and issued a position statement entitled “Implementing alternatives to coercion. A key component to improving mental healthcare”.
Mental health is the only area of healthcare where people can still be treated without their consent outside of emergency situations even though research shows that people are at no greater risk than the general population and have similar levels of decision-making capacity.
While only 16% of people being admitted for mental health treatment in Ireland in 2020 are detained under the legislation, the threat of coercion permeates the whole system and affects everyone who is admitted on a voluntary or involuntary basis due to regrading powers in the legislation.
Coercion includes any intervention or treatment given against a person’s will or without their informed consent and can be actual or implied. Supports can be provided where a person is unable to consent. The fear that non-compliance with mental health treatment may lead to detention in hospital or forced treatment under the legislation is described as ‘a coercive shadow’. Many people are not seeking help when they need it for this reason. Any treatment decision made under the threat of coercion is not free and informed consent.
Coercion has a profound impact on the person and should not be viewed as necessary to treat people. It is incorrect to state that people won’t be able to access treatment or care unless we retain mental health legislation in its current form. It is not necessary to violate human rights to respect them.
Involuntary detention and treatment are not necessary if we have a system of support and alternatives in place to allow people to access treatment in accordance with their wishes in these situations. Our new Assisted Decision-Making (Capacity) Act (due to commence this summer) is moving towards a system of supported decision-making for this very reason. Our new mental health policy, Sharing the Vision, also states that coercion should only be used in emergency circumstances.
Fear of system
There is no evidence that current approaches are working or giving people any choice. Readmission rates of 61% in the mental health system suggest we need to consider funding alternatives. Coercion is extremely stigmatising and traumatising for the person and can lead to a breakdown of trust, leading to further isolation.
Many people with lived experience of being treated in the mental health system and under the legislation (who are the most important experts on this) feel their human rights have been violated and they have not been listened to. This has caused additional trauma from which they have had to recover from, a breakdown in family and therapeutic relationships and deterred people from seeking treatment.
The following experiences have been encapsulated in quotations from research undertaken with people treated under our mental health legislation.
It is an awful feeling to know your liberty and rights can be taken away from you at any time and that you have no say whatsoever in your treatment.- Service user A
When I became unwell … an ambulance, two police and a swarm of psychiatric nurses and ambulance staff arrived at my house, even though I had not endangered my own life or those around me. My experience with psychiatry was a very negative one. It nearly destroyed me. I am trying hard to bounce back from the trauma of it all … My mental health has been severely damaged by the experience.- Service user B
Another person feels her only option is to stay well as a result of her experience:
Personally, I continue to feel unsafe should I experience another mental health episode … My only option now … is to stay well.
- Service user C
Why are people still living in fear of being admitted for mental health treatment? Is this the only way we can provide treatment and care to people when they are most vulnerable?
What form of treatment and care or alternatives are we offering outside of medication?
According to psychiatrist Professor Dainius Puras who is a former UN Rapporteur on the Right to Physical and Mental Health, the human rights situation in mental health services is alarming. He recently presented to the Oireachtas Sub-Committee on Mental Health. He states that:
To a large extent the systemic global failure in the field of mental health is related to the prevalent use of non-consensual measures … Although mental health laws in many countries are supposed to protect the rights of persons with psychosocial disabilities, in practice, these laws are systematically deployed to override basic rights of many users of services through the widespread use of non-consensual measures.
Prof Puras goes on to state that:
Some influential professional organisations of psychiatrists … remain opposed to emerging changes and continue to support the status quo. It is important to highlight that the right to health has been misinterpreted as a right to provide mental health services (even without the consent of the person) as more important than other rights, such as the right to refuse treatment, the right to bodily autonomy, and the rights to be free from discrimination, inhuman and degrading treatment.
The readmission rates suggest that current approaches are not working, and we need to move in a different direction urgently. This is an obligation, not a choice. It is critical we all work together to effect much-needed change in this area. This is in all our interests.
We remain hopeful in the words of Professor Puras that “national psychiatric associations will support the emerging movement in the field of mental health towards the elimination of a legacy that discriminates and disempowers persons with psychosocial disabilities and other mental health conditions.”
The Advocates for Human Rights in Mental Health Care is comprised of: Dr Fiona Morrissey, Disability Law Researcher, Lecturer, ATU, Adjunct Lecturer, NUI Galway; Jennifer Hough (Family Member); Dr Charles O’Mahony, School of Law, NUI Galway; Fiona Anderson, BA, LLM, Recovery Expert by Experience; Dr Liz Brosnan, Academic, Survivor Researcher, Recovery Expert by Experience; Rosy Wilson, Retired Lecturer, Recovery Expert by Experience; Dr Harry Gijbels, Retired Lecturer, UCC, Former Mental Health Nurse and Deirdre Lillis, Advocate, SHEP.
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I’d rather be able to figure out code. That way at least I might be able to figure out what the jaysus the wife does be giving out to me about
The coding world moves so fast, it’s hard to know what too learn next. But just learn something the core concepts on clean code and structure are much the same across most languages.
That’s good advice.
That’s not really true,.
All software languages have very much the same structure, it’s not like learning a spoken language.
If you’re good at one language you’re more than competent at most others.
If you’re looking for a good place to start, it’s probably JavaScript due to the ease of set up.
?? Pretty sure that’s what I just said.
It doesn’t change that much.
Rubbish Stephen. Different programming languages have different syntax and semantics. There are language families which are similar in syntax such as (C++, Objective-C, Java, Perl, C#, JavaScript which are all from the C family of languages) and then you have the BASIC Family, Smalltalk family and a host of others. Some languages borrow concepts from languages in different families and nest under more than one family tree.
If you are good in say PHP you are most certainly not, by default, good in Ruby or Python. If you are a stellar COBOL programmer you would certainly not be able to code a single line of a more modern language without learning it first.
To become competent in programming takes dedication and hard work. I have seen many programmers who have been programming years and are still not what I would classify as competent based on some of the code they churn out. Only the very gifted can become masterful at a given language in a short period of time.
Yea I know about languages and I know they’ve all different syntax, I’ve done most of the ones you mentioned and that’s why I said the core concepts are the same. A function is a function and a class is a class in most languages. An import is an import and to extend is to extend. Patterns in ruby are the same as JavaScript and php. Obviously the way it’s written is different and how it’s fun but the concept is the same. If you understand good programming in any language I believe you can move between languages very easily. I’ve been a ruby, rails, js, php, c, objective c, Python dev and more in my time and that all came from learning actionscript years ago.
Id recommend learning a simple language like Haskell first and then moving on to more diverse languages like Python, Java or C++. Some lads in my college ran an intro to Haskell course and the structure and methodology of it is a good way to get used to programming as you write the code almost in the same way that you ‘think’ of the code. Java (from my own experience) can be a bit daunting if you can’t get your head around the pretty rigid structure of methods and classes etc. I’m using Khan Academy at the minute to learn HTML and CSS as well and couldn’t recommend it more (even though the peppy, overly positive American narrating the video is starting to grate on my cynical Irish sensibilities)
I would recommend learning Java, C++ or C#. In college I found Haskell more daunting than the afformentioned. Also if you learn one of these languages you have pretty much learned 70% of any of the others.
Agreed, Object Oriented languages are easier to grasp, then when you’re ready you can go impress the chicks with your mad Haskell skillz.
Matthew, this is a good point, I had to give the postman a tip last saturday for all the valentines day cards my Haskell abilities got me.
Glad you’re not taking it seriously or anything..
Apologies Matthew for any offense caused
So many codes these days I have only got use to the safe cross one now your telling me there is more.
Buy an arduino starter kit and a raspberry pi and head over to instructables.com
2 years ago I had no clue and now I’m pretty comfortable with having a go at a lot of physical computing type stuff.
And it’s never too late either. I’m now 38.
Or if you want to take it one step further, get a NerdKit (http://www.nerdkits.com/)
+1 for Arduino though, personally I use mBed, if I want to knock something quickly up for work I always have an Arduino or mBed in my drawer in work.
If you want to get into the likes of Arduino/mBed I would seriously consider getting familiar with the C language, it’s a great language to know and it’s used in anything embedded related.
I guess these are the only options given that potential programmers are abandoned by the second level education system in this country.
I learned Borland’s Pascal, Prolog and a 4GL called MicroSQL in highschool back in 1992-3.
Since then I’ve covered these languages in order DBQ, DBase IV, MS Access (with strong VBA), VB6, TSQL, VB .Net, ASP .Net, JavaScript, C#, Java, Matlab, Octave, R.
People recommending languages here are making assumptions about what you want to do. Different languages have very different purposes. Also, if you just focus too much on a specific language you will find yourself spending an inordinate amount of time learning things that suddenly become completely redundant.
The only skill I learned in 1992 that is of any use to me today is SQL. It is important to ensure you develop the ability to quickly switch between languages and quickly learn new languages. That requires a fundamental understanding of programming itself and not getting too comfortable with a particular syntax.
From my experience, my son was home schooled and learned it all by himself. He lost me at 11.
Then I have to remember the nice HSE agent who wanted to use ECT on him to normalise him.
Now that’s Ireland for you.
His birthday is this week and he is in Forbes and living thousands of miles from Ireland where he is appreciated and valued.
…Jesus.
Good on him, but to be honest everyone has to learn it themselves.
It’s near impossible to “teach” it to someone.
Watch Bucky on the NewBoston on YouTube. He’s brilliant!
Fact. Many an assignment was done watching these videos. He is a tad sleazy. In a good way.
Am currently mentoring in a CoderDojo, teaching kids 6 and up. Once you learn fundamentals of if/else, loops, and functions, all you need is practice. Look at other peoples code. If you see something you like on a website, your browser has all the inbuilt development tools to help you figure out how they did it.
http://www.codecademy.com/ is another free online learning tool.
As for first programming languages. I started on C++, but would not recommend it for a beginner. I would try Python or Ruby.
Apples swift is a nice alternative to c++ I’m told. It can be ported into html5, CSS and js afaik
Ties you to Apple only really unfortunately, if you were going down the HTML5 app route, look at Ionic and Cordova, or something like PhoneGap (also built on Cordova).
There’s a freely available Swift compiler called Silver, which you can install on both Mac and Windows PC. Probably not what Apple wanted, but now Swiftians can avoid the tie in if they prefer.
Excellent article, perhaps a bit daunting for a complete novice though.
A more basic hands on approach to coding can be found through the Raspberry Pi foundation.
A great starting point for parents and kids.
So, everyone is advocating their own personal favourite code flavour as the one to learn first. This is starting in the wrong place.
Code is a tool. Nothing more than that. It’s something that enables you to get things done. So, the logical place to begin is with something you want to do. Once you’ve established that, then, and only then, find out what the right tool is and learn how to use it by doing the thing you want to do. Sure, you’ll need to learn some basic principles, but after that just start making something.
Now, it’ll probably be poor enough, this thing you make. And three years later you’ll look at the code you wrote and either laugh or cry (don’t be concerned about this, it happens everyone who codes anything, all the time, forever). But you’ll start learning, fast, and you’ll build not just on what works but what fails.
I’ve been relearning to to code the past two years. I did C in college but hated it. However, I discovered something the past two years that has reignited my love of it.
You can take the Harvard computer science course, for free. The course is called CS50 and you can do it on edex.org. I would encourage ANYONE who wants to learn how to code to do it. An absolutely INSANE amount of effort goes into its production. It’s very… American, but that’s part of its charm. The quality of the course makes you see why Harvard can charge so much in fees. I’ve done about 50 different programming courses in my day and this is by far the best. The content was exactly the same as the first year computer science course in DIT just presented in a much better way.
I’d also recommend some of the basic courses on Lynda.com by a lecturer called Simon Allerdice. He’s Irish I believe (just from his accent) and he has a way to make things very VERY clear.
If I was to do it all again, I’d do the CS50 course, the Lynda courses by Simon Allerdice and learn python.
Python and Javascript were the languages that taught me object oriented programming. I tried learning Java first (after C) and it was a nightmare. Not because of the language, but because I didn’t understand OOP properly. Programmers often forget how difficult OOP is as a concept to understand because once you get it, it’s difficult to imagine programming another way. Especially in a shared library world.
Why does everyone need to learn coding? It’s not that great and oversaturated around the world
A lot of information on the internet can be useful. But it can also be very hit and miss. I love learning from videos and online resources. However for programming books are essential if you want to take it a step further.
Lightbot is brill for kids … graphical and introduces “Procedures” … reusable code concept.
Scratch is also good for kids. Some schools now using it.
Unity for games … and its free
Codecademy for Ruby : http://www.codecademy.com/learn … clear and concise
Ruby on Rails for real world serious apps. http://rubyonrails.org/
Some research suggests that it is teaching of Philosophy in secondary schools that makes the French the best software engineers in the world! Also nice side effect of No Financial Crashes … Philosophy provides a framework for good rational thinking, very useful in personal and work lives!!!!
Actually only one in five are aware of coding initiatives, like coder dojo. Three quarters of parents are keen to get johnny and Jane into coding. According to amarach research for upc and coder dojo. Some schools reachbscratch. Which us a visual programming language to teach basic things Luke loops and functions so they can move more easily to more complex languages. With npm and node.js JavaScript, the once clunky beast is getting more use. Its great for RAD in the way Rails is. While HTML and CSS arent really coding they offer a soft entry to that world. And are complex enough in themselves now in html5 and css3,
delete *.*
Waste of time. By the time these kids grow up strong AI will be writing code from a users simple instructions.
It will be AI written by people who learned to code as kids instead of listening to those who said it was a waste of time.
In that case, you should program in machine code.
The bandwagon rolls on, when’s this one going to blow up in everyone’s face
Well, the IT skills shortage has already blown up in our faces. That’s why, despite the unemployment problem, we have to import a large proportion of our workforce. Think of that next time the Gov. announce they’ve created x number of jobs after bringing yet another tech company onto our shores.
It would help if they actually employed very experienced coders. Unfortunately the young age of “managers” these days means they are intimidated by the very experienced and ignore the value these people can offer their company. It is the young and cheap that get the jobs. It doesn’t dawn on the hiring managers that if they pay for experience, the get better quality and get it faster.
Someone do a survey of how many people over 50 who are unable to get work, despite having 30+ years experience as a programmer.
It’s not that difficult and can be done within a year. I’m self taught in C++, java and python. I’m still being paid for what I helped build over 6 years ago. The world has always been divided by those who can manipulate their environment and those who can’t and this is the future. You should look into your local Coder Dojo if you have kids, it’s FREE or consider a Fab Lab.
No thanks, we’re too advanced as it is. Technology is taking over the world unfortunately.
People can learn code but can’t tell when the government is telling them porkies?
More “cowboys” to join the ranks of amateur coders who think they are experts to fleece the gullible…
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