WATCH: Situation ‘getting worse’ - Mental Health Champion
'It is really sad to say the priorities for this city need to be around crisis services' - Professor Siobhan O'Neill
The North’s Mental Health Champion did not mince her words regarding the failure of Stormont’s ‘Mental Health Strategy 2021-2031’.
In line with commitments made as part of the New Decade, New Approach agreement (January 9, 2020), then Health Minister Robin Swann launched the Strategy on June 29, 2021.
Speaking at the opening of the new Men’s Action Network premises in Derry city centre on Friday, Professor Siobhan O’Neill described the situation regarding mental health in the North as “getting worse”.
“We are now in a position where we have to really acknowledge that the Mental Health Strategy is not going to be delivered,” she said.
“We are not going to see the transformation that was envisaged in the New Decade, New Approach deal that everybody signed up to.
“We now have to focus on priorities.
“It is really sad to say the priorities for this city and for Northern Ireland generally need to be around crisis services, need to be around helping people and providing community-based support.
“Now the Reset plan is going in that direction too and we need to delve deeper to see what that is going to look like on the ground because there is very little attention so far around mental health services in that Reset plan, so I am looking at that to see what that will mean for mental health and mental health services.”
The Health and Social Care (HSC) Reset Plan, published in July 2025, is an initiative designed to “stabilise and reform” the North’s health services.
“We are seeing an increase in suicides, 16% increase in the three year rolling averages, since 2017,” said Professor O’Neill.
“The reality of that is an extra 33 deaths every year. 33 more people are dying now than there were earlier, that’s back in 2017.
“That is not acceptable at a time when we are supposed to be delivering a mental health strategy and a suicide prevention strategy. Things are getting worse.
“In our report ‘Mental Health in Northern Ireland: Current Services and Strategic Priorities (April 2026)’ we also highlighted that similar proportions of the population actually suffer from poor mental health as they did back in the early 2000s but we have an increase in PTSD - from 5.1% to 6.1% More people are suffering from PTSD now.
“The inequalities have widened. When I was first doing this work, I think it was around 7.6% of the population were reporting they had four or more adverse childhood experiences - childhood adversities increase your risk of mental illness. Now that figure is up over 17%.”
“Poverty is worse. There is a widening gap between the deprived areas and the least deprived areas, between the rich and the poor,” said Professor O’Neill, who highlighted that one in four children live in poverty and in the most deprived areas the rates of suicide are more than three times higher than the least deprived areas.
She also pointed out the “overlapping impact of deprivation, poverty, transgenerational trauma, resulting from the conflict and from everything that has come along with that”.
Professor O’Neill said men were overrepresented in the suicide figures.
“Over three quarters of the suicides are males and again these are men, many of whom don’t perceive themselves even to have a mental illness or a mental health problem [but] adversity impacts on men in a way that means you have these unexpected suicides with no history, with no prior reporting, so it is really, really important we have services for man and for men who are in crisis,” she explained.
“When we look at the city it is very interesting that the self-harm registry figures came out there last week and there hasn’t been much media attention on them.
"I don’t see any of the ministers talking about this and we need to recognise that in the Western Trust there is a really high, a disproportionate number of self-harm attempts coming to our hospitals compared to other areas.
“And we are the only part of Northern Ireland that doesn’t have that 24 hour wrap-around community-based crisis service. There is a crisis service in the Trust but we don’t have multi agency triage (MAT) teams. We don’t have community navigators in our hospital here. There is a dearth of services for people who are in crisis.
“And we have seen a 65% an increase [in the number] of people coming to the Emergency Departments across Northern Ireland with suicidal ideation in the last 10 years. Arguably it is getting worse and more people are suffering.”
“Then there is the overlapping impact of poverty. The answer actually now, for me, is not about trying to implement the Mental Health Strategy in full. I think we need to focus on the things that will make the most difference to people who are in need right now,” said Professor O’Neill, who advocated for services in the community and voluntary sector which could “pivot and set up a service really quickly.
“Preventative services, safe spaces where people can go when they are in crisis,” she added.
“This {new MAN centre] is so good. It is so good for everybody when we have a safe space for men to go to to get help and support in their own community.
“Today has just given me so much hope because this is what we need more of but it is also an opportunity, and there are some of our elected representatives here, to highlight the deficit of services in this area and to call for more services, more funding - more sustainable, long-term funding so that we can get more support services, like MAN in our city.”
John McAtamney, Men’s Action Network chairperson, trustee and former service welcomed everyone to the new centre, which he said “had been made possible by the generosity of a local businessman, funding from the Housing Executive and a number of individuals who raised funding for the charity.
“It is also due to all the hard work of all the volunteers and MAN thanks you all from the bottom of its huge heart,” he added.
Sinn Féin Foyle MLA Pádraig Delargy, chair of Stormont’s All-Party group on Mental health the “fantastic new facility” showed “community and this service in particular are the backbone of what we see in terms of mental health support, much needed mental health support”.