Local Lad Always Off His Face On Pills
AFTER finally reaching out to his GP in a bid to confront the anxiety and depression that has dragged him down for as long as he can remember, local man Cillian O’Hearne now spends his days on a range of hastily-prescribed medication which may be helping or may not, time will tell.
28-year-old O’Hearne assured WWN that he feels much better these days, although he added that with no real experience of what ‘better’ feels like, he’s not exactly sure if he is indeed better, or if his medication is just ‘keeping him at the right level’.
Having approached his doctor many times with concerns and questions about his condition, the Waterford born father of two has had his prescription changed many times with the advice to ‘try these for a while and see how you get on’ in lieu of the HSE being able to provide access to counselling or therapy.
“If I jump up and down, I rattle,” said O’Hearne, lining out his dosages for the week so as not see what happens if he forgets to take his medication, something he’s not keen to find out.
“I had concerns about the pages of possible side-effects that are listed on the box of each prescription, but the doctor told me to just keep an eye out if the mood-altering medication altered my mood in a manner that I was not comfortable with, which is a bit of a stretch seeing as how being uncomfortable with my mood is what brought me here in the first place. I asked him about actual counselling and therapy that could be more helpful than a bottle of pills, and he just started crying real tears at the state of HSE ‘services’. Luckily I had a few pills to share with him. Have one of these doc, sort you right out”.
As the prescription of anti-depressants is still the preferred and often successful method of keeping a lid on the mental health crisis in Ireland, leading to €400m a year being spent on medicating patients and just €10m being invested in counselling and other treatments by the HSE, Cillian will have to continue to get pilled out of his head until new funding is found, or he ‘just gets better by himself’.