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Seamus Logan argues that Northern Ireland's mental health services urgently require ring-fenced funding.

As a student of mental health care 20 years ago, I couldn't understand why it was referred to as a "Cinderella service". But it makes sense that people's attention will be more easily captured by headlines involving life-threatening conditions such as cancer or heart disease. Mental health problems rarely lead to death.

Yet the World Health Organisation tells us that depression will be one of the biggest health challenges for the Western world in the 21st century. In Belfast, throughout the troubles, suicide has been a major cause of premature death. Now, in less troubled times, it is the single biggest cause of death among our young males. Each year in Northern Ireland, there are about 10,000 admissions to mental health hospital beds and 11,000 new referrals to psychiatrists. We spend about 10 per cent of our health and personal social services allocation here directly on mental health care, but it feels as if we get 0.1 per cent of the public's attention.

People in Northern Ireland, including our new locally elected assembly, seem oblivious to the fact that the UK government has identified mental health care as one of its top priorities. It made it the subject of its first national service framework and allocated a tidy sum to drive its implementation. Our response? Well, not a lot at a political level yet, and certainly nothing like the level of ring-fenced investment promised for England.

Even some of our planners seem to think that the entire integrated health and social services structure begins and ends at the doors of a general hospital. Worse still, despite the valuable and unique contribution to mental well-being that approved social workers make, a forthcoming review of mental health legislation, prompted by a similar process in England, may threaten to remove their function, making the process more medical and less social.

By April, the establishment of local health and social care groups, our equivalent of primary care groups, will be a reality. Can we depend on them to make mental health care a priority as they begin to shoulder the responsibilities of commissioning health and social care?

It is right that agencies such as the Eastern Health and Social Services Board in Belfast try to address these strategic planning issues by forging partnerships at all levels. While my heart tells me we need this kind of leadership, my head tells me that the only real answer is ring-fenced funding if we are to provide the urgent help that mental health services need.

Seamus Logan is project manager for the mental health strategy at Eastern Health and Social Services Board.