More services are needed to address mental health challenges after stroke, and to support families, a Cork stroke survivor has said.<\/p>\n
A new report from Cork Stroke Support and University College Cork (UCC) found that there were eight individual organisations\/volunteers that provide stroke support services in Cork, and 20 in Munster.<\/p>\n
However, gaps were identified in service provision, with survivors noting that supports for their mental health were often lacking.<\/p>\n
Chris Murphy, a 51-year-old from Millstreet, who had a stroke nearly five years ago, said: \u201cThere is a lot of emphasis on physical recovery but not enough on the mental side. My confidence took a big hit.\u201d<\/p>\n
He told The Echo that when he had his stroke, it was \u201call a big shock\u201d.<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cIt happened during covid, so my wife dropped me at the hospital and didn\u2019t see me again for a month. I was lucky that I had two daughters working in CUH so I could see them, but a lot of people there had nobody.\u201d<\/p>\n
After spending a month in hospital, he went home.<\/p>\n
\u201cMentally, it was a struggle. The hospital dealt a lot with the physical side, but they didn\u2019t deal with the mental. When you\u2019re at home, sitting in a chair all day, the head worries you the most.<\/p>\n
\n \u201cYou feel your legs and your hands coming back, but you can\u2019t feel your head. My short term memory would still be poor, I struggle remembering people\u2019s names.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
He said that he never went back to work, and went from being a keen runner to needing his wife to walk him around the house, but now he is able to walk 10-15k a day.<\/p>\n
Building relationships with other stroke survivors through Cork Stroke Support helped him hugely, he said. \u201cI didn\u2019t know this place was here for the first year, and I struggled a lot \u2014 when I came in I realised there was life after stroke.\u201d<\/p>\n
Helen Kelly, senior lecturer in speech and language therapy at UCC, who led the report, agreed that mental health support for stroke survivors was lacking.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people don\u2019t know about the long term impairments,\u201d such as communication difficulties, which have a negative impact on mental health.<\/p>\n
She continued: \u201cThere definitely needs to be more family support. Some organisations provide that support, many don\u2019t. It has a huge impact on family life.\u201d<\/p>\n
More younger people are having strokes, and they often have younger children, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cTheir parent can be in hospital for months, and when they come home they might be a different person, they might have mobility or communication struggles.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow do they deal with that, if their parent can\u2019t speak to them or bring them places or play football? There definitely is a need for support there.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More services are needed to address mental health challenges after stroke, and to support families, a Cork stroke…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":282508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[79,103,61,60,410,411],"class_list":["post-282507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-cork-news","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/282508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}