Dr Michael Kelleher (1938-1998)

Extract

Psychiatrists throughout Ireland lost a valued and respected colleague when Michael Kelleher died on the 9th August 1998. It is unusual for a doctor and certainly for a psychiatrist to receive widespread tributes in the national as well as the professional press, and these have borne eloquent witness to Michael's qualities as a man and to his achievements as a psychiatrist.

Dr Kelleher's major achievements have been well recorded: they particularly concern his research in Cork on suicide in the latter decades of the 20th century. This interest arose from his work with a post-graduate student, Dr Maura Daly, in the early 1980s. They identified the rising suicide rate, especially amongst the young, and set about understanding the phenomena they carefully observed. Having provided evidence that improved official reporting of suicide was not a sufficient cause of the rising rate, Dr Kelleher moved on to focus on unemployment, the availability of medicines, substance abuse and the rapid changes in Irish society in seeking to explain these disturbing trends. His writing was careful and considered and he maintained a consistently high standard of scholarship. This is clearly evident in his editorial “Youth suicide trends in the Republic of Ireland” for the British Journal of Psychiatry, published posthumously in September 1998. In latter years his voice became familiar in the media when he was always lucid and cautionary, while strongly advocating measures to improve Ireland's mental health.