Throughout history, mental health was something to be hidden away. It was “un-understandable”. Asylums dotted the Irish landscape and the names of those institutions became short-hand for everything we didn’t want to talk about. We didn’t talk about suicide. We didn’t talk about depression. We didn’t talk about anxiety. In the 1950s, we committed the largest number of people per capita in Europe. Mental health difficulties were brushed under layers of silence. Stigma forced individuals to hide, absolved communities of the responsibility to support them and allowed every government since the creation of the State to ignore and neglect mental health services.

Underlying this stigma were basic untruths which however false were widely accepted: “mental health difficulties happen to other people”; “it’s the person’s fault”; “someone can never get over mental health problems”. Mental health became a category of person rather than a health problem that someone can experience and get over.....