Mental Health

MENTAL HEALTH

BBC Panorama goes inside one of the UK’s largest frontline mental health trusts.   Describes how the system is so overloaded and other support services so decimated that staff feel they often struggle to meet all their patients’ needs.

Labour Manifesto 2017:

Mental ill-health is the biggest unaddressed health challenge of our age. Around one in four people in the UK will experience a mental health problem each year.

Yet, since 2010 mental health funding has been cut, the number of mental health nurses has fallen by 6,600 and remaining mental health budgets have been raided to plug holes elsewhere in the NHS.

Labour will work to reverse the damage done to mental health services under this Tory government, which is particularly hitting services for LGBT and BAME communities.

In order to protect services, we will ring-fence mental health budgets and ensure funding reaches the frontline.

We will end the scandal of children being treated on adult mental health wards and stop people being sent across the country, away from their support networks, to secure the treatment they need by bringing forward the ending of out-of-area placements to 2019.

Labour will also bring an end to the neglect of children’s mental health. Half of people with mental health problems as adults present with symptoms by the age of 14. Yet, across England only 8 per cent of mental health funding goes to services for children and young people. In recent years, referrals to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services have increased by two-thirds, and the number of young people presenting to A&E units with psychiatric conditions has doubled.  Suicide is now the most common cause of death for boys aged between five and nineteen.

Labour will invest in early intervention by increasing the proportion of mental health budgets spent on support for children and young people. We will ensure that access to a counselling service is available for all children in secondary schools.

Giving mental health the same priority as physical health means not only ensuring access to services, but also making improvements, to those services. Choice is important in a modern NHS, and patients who receive their therapy of choice have better outcomes. Labour will therefore ask the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) to evaluate the potential for increasing the range of evidence based psychological therapies on offer.

 

Guardian, 11 June: Public support for mental health care funding for NHS

Challenging the stigma around mental health and treating mental illness in par with physical illness in the NHS.

  • Increasing the number of mental health professionals.
  • Increasing investment in children’s mental health.
  • Ensuring mental health education is taught in UK schools that also provide school-based counselling or therapy.
  • Introducing into the school curriculum, a course on life skills, emotional intelligence and parenting to better equip children to the challenges of modern living.
  • Undertaking a national study in to the mental health of children and young people.
  • Launching a national campaign to tackle loneliness and the stigma around it to reverse mental illnesses related to chronic loneliness.
  • Challenging the high rates of mental illness among women.
  • Investing in support services to reduce waiting times for counselling.

Facts & Figures

  • Over 20% of NHS conditions are related to mental health issues but receives only 10% of its budget.
  • In England there is only 1 mental health specialist per 30,000 young peoples under 20, compared with one per 5,300 in Switzerland, 6,000 in Finland and 7,500 in France.
  • Women are 70% more likely than men to experience depression and twice as likely to have an anxiety disorder.

 

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