'It still is a barrier': Almost 40% of women feel 'lonely and isolated'
Nearly two in five women feel 'lonely and isolated' and only 8% think it is easy to access mental health services, an Irish Examiner Ipsos B+A survey has found.
These barriers remain despite almost half the women surveyed saying it is easier to talk about mental health challenges today than in the past.
Some 1,078 women were surveyed across Ireland.
Women were asked to say how true this is for them: 'I often feel lonely or isolated nowadays'.
Some 12% said they strongly agree with this, 27% said they somewhat agree while 18% said they strongly disagreed.
Almost two in every five women have visited a healthcare professional about mental health in recent years.
A larger number however - 60% - said they have not seen anyone for mental health supports in recent years.
Some issues stood out as pushing women to need help including fertility struggles and experiencing a miscarriage as well as perimenopause and to a lesser extent menopause.
However, among women who sought help, 30% said access to a professional was either poor or very poor in their experience.
Only 13% said this was very good and 27% said this was good.
Crisis café
Reacting to some of these findings, operations manager with the Solas Café in Cork, Breda Richardson, suggested childcare could be a barrier. This HSE-funded café offers out-of-hours mental health support for men and women.
'We're creating an out-of-hours crisis café for people experiencing mental health difficulties,' she said.
'We're open Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings, it's a pilot scheme. People can make an appointment for up to 1.5 hours between 6pm and 10.30pm.
'Even with that (flexibility), it still is a barrier for women because a lot of women are on their own and they do have children. And we can't have children come to the café, there still is that barrier there,' she said.
'We have raised that, but it is difficult for people.'
Among those who use the café, they see 'people are isolated, people have social anxiety'. Carers, including people caring for elderly relatives or people whose spouse is unwell whether physically or mentally, often attend.
They provide 'a listening ear', she said, and can also direct people with more severe illnesses to specialist help. Similar cafes will open in Limerick and Waterford, she added.
The survey was carried out by Ipsos B+A for Feelgood, with a nationally representative sample of 1,078 women aged over 16.
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Ipsos B&A has strict quality control measures in place to ensure robust and reliable findings; results based on the full sample carry a margin of error of +/-2.8%. In other words, if the research was repeated identically results would be expected to lie within this range on 19 occasions out of 20. A variety of aspects were assessed in relation to women's health including fertility, birth, menopause, mental health, health behaviour, and alcohol consumption.
