We’ll be having daily deeper and more detailed look at the party’s main theme. Today it’s mental health. Nick Clegg and Norman Lamb this morning said that Liberal Democrats (or should that be Democats?) would invest £3.5 billion in mental health over the next Parliament.
Part of our record in Government includes securing £150 million to help young people with eating disorders. A new video shows Kat sharing her experience of living with an eating disorder:
The Party’s Manifesto for the mind outlines a wide-ranging suite of measures to improve mental health services:
● Continue to roll out access and waiting time standards for children, young people and adults, in line with the strategy launched last October. This will include a waiting time standard from referral of no more than 6 weeks for therapy for depression or anxiety and a two week wait standard for all young people experiencing a first episode of psychosis.
● Increase access to evidence based talking therapies so that hundreds of thousands more people can get access to this support. Our long term goal is to see everyone who can benefit being treated, but we will set an interim target of raising access to 25% of those who could benefit as soon as possible.
● Invest £250m over five years in transforming care for pregnant women, new mothers and those who have experienced miscarriage or still birth, and help them get the early care they need.
● As announced in the Budget, we will invest £1.25bn over five years to revolutionise children’s mental health services, to ensure every child has the opportunity to get on in life. We will implement the proposals outlined in the recent report of the Children’s Mental Health Taskforce. This means building better links with schools, ensuring all children develop mental resilience, and getting support and care quickly to those who are struggling. Our investment will help ensure children can access high quality care closer to home.
● We will put mental health on the curriculum and build better links with schools. Our investment will help ensure children are able to access high quality care nearer to home, enabling them to keep in contact with family and friends.
● Ensure that no one in crisis will be turned away, with new waiting time standards and better crisis care in hospital A&E departments, in the community and with crisis phone lines. This will enable us to end the use of police cells for people suffering from a mental health crisis.
● Establish a world-leading mental health research fund, investing £50m in cutting edge research to further our understanding of mental illness and the most effective treatments.
● Continue to support the Time to Change programme to tackle stigma against mental health.
● Introduce care navigators so that people get help finding their way around the system.
● Set stretching targets to improve the physical health of people with mental health problems and join up care so there is more mental health support in your GP surgery and more physical health advice and support within mental health services.
● Ensure all front line public service professionals, including in schools and universities, get better training in mental health – helping them to develop their own mental resilience as well as learning to identify people with mental health problems.
● Radically transform mental health services, extending the use of personal budgets, integrating care more fully with the rest of the NHS, introducing rigorous inspection and high quality standards, comprehensive collection of data to monitor outcomes and waiting times and changing the way services are funded so that they do not lose out in funding decisions in future.
● Publish a national wellbeing strategy which puts better health and wellbeing for all at the heart of government policy. This includes promoting better public health policy to benefit mental as well as physical health, such as access to the natural environment.
● As part of this strategy, we will develop a clear approach on preventing mental ill health, with a public health campaign promoting the steps people can take to improve their own mental health – the wellbeing equivalent of the “five a day” campaign for healthy eating.
● Support the development of good practice among employers in promoting wellbeing and ensure people with mental health problems get the help they need to stay in their jobs or to find work.
The bottom line
This would be paid for by abolishing the Conservatives’ shares for rights, raising the Capital Gains annual exemption to £2,500 and increasing the percentage of shares you need to own before qualifying for Entrepreneur’s Relief and incorporates money already secured by the Liberal Democrats for the NHS in the budget and Autumn statement. The element of risk in the figures is that they depend on continued economic growth enabling increased tax receipts to be invested in the NHS.
A huge practical difference
Three quick observations about the measures proposed, which will make a huge difference to so many people.
We’ve heard countless examples over the years of people in great distress having to wait many months to even be seen. The party’s proposals go a long way to tackling this.
We heard recently of a situation where a teenager was sent to an Accident and Emergency Department for a mental health matter and experienced a distressing encounter with staff who clearly had no idea to relate to someone in their state. Unable to speak, this teenager withdrew into themselves as they were told that they were wasting people’s time if they didn’t talk. That shows why better training is absolutely vital to promote understanding.
Particularly welcome is the extra funding to help mothers with post natal depression or parents who have suffered the agony of stillbirth or miscarriage. There is greater understanding these days about the distress and grief that people experience on losing a child, but the services and support available don’t match the need for them.
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22 Comments
Is this £3.5bn part of the £8bn for the NHS or in addition to it?
Although I do have the greatest sympathy for anyone suffering mental health problems – is this rapidly increasing debility within the population being approached from the right direction?
• Thousands of people have committed suicide as a direct result of the austerity measures [far more than have died from terrorists during the same period] – IDS’s department knows the numbers but he refuses to release them.
• The current improvement in the economy has been aided by the decrease in the price of oil – which has naturally increased the sales of fuel – yet we are constantly being reminded of the treats posed by climate change – the actual consequences of this is largely unknown – but they are likely to be dire.
• Today it has been revealed that – Nearly one in 10 (9%) of children in the age group [12-13] are worried that they are addicted to porn, a survey of nearly 700 children for the NSPCC’s ChildLine service found.
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/one-10-children-addicted-porn-8951519
• We are told that there is a continuous high threat of a terrorist striking at any time
Is it any wonder that so many are suffering anxiety and/or depression and that a recent survey found the most common answer when people were asked what they liked about Britain – was the past!
We have had many changes since the turn of the century, particularly under the Coalition – which have led to these uncertain and troubling times – wouldn’t it be better approach to focus on these causes rather than trying to repair damaged minds – a process that is long and expensive which often does not succeed?
I am not prone to quoting Russell Brand – however this from today’s Independent does reinforce these points:
The answer, he considers, is in the hands of those in power, like FOX News.
“The reason FOX News can’t be honest about what causes mental illness is that FOX News IS what causes mental illness,” he continues.
“FOX News are the propaganda machine of capitalism – a system that separates us from one another and tells us the way to solve our individual problems is through purchasing, through buying things, through identifying primarily through our roles as consumers, not as active citizens or participants in society, members in communities that should care about others, but people who shouldn’t be condemning those who are weaker, vilifying people that act in any way that’s unusual. We know in the core of our being that that isn’t right, so it creates a friction and a tension. We know that what [the FOX Anchor] is saying isn’t true. ”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/russell-brand-blames-germanwings-crash-on-plague-of-mental-illness-catalysed-by-capitalism-10145264.html
While I welcome this news – my son has been on the CAMHS waiting list with Berkshire NHS Trust for 8 months and I was told last week that their waiting list was 18 months (so he won’t be seen until January 2016)!
Helen, that should not be the case after 6 April when there are waiting time targets to be in place.
I think it’s part of it, Philip.
John Roffey
“Thousands of people have committed suicide as a direct result of the austerity measures [far more than have died from terrorists during the same period] – IDS’s department knows the numbers but he refuses to release them.”
Well done, John for pointing out the obvious that LDV ignores.
Excellent, excellent post, @John Roffey.
Nobody in this party wants to talk about the deaths which have resulted from your actions in government. Let’s be clear about this: most of your MPs voted for cuts to services which the most vulnerable and powerless in our society rely on. The Bedroom Tax, the welfare cuts, the inhumane WCA and DWP sanctions have caused the health of already ill people to deteriorate and some people have felt so trapped they have committed suicide. This should be a national scandal, but since most of these people are on benefits, nobody cares. After all, they’re “scroungers” anyway (a Tory narrative which the LibDems have done precious little to counter).
While I welcome increased action on mental health, this is just a sticking plaster. Until we address the root causes of why so many people in modern society are developing mental illnesses, this will continue. Many people with mental illnesses are miserable because they feel they don’t belong. Our worth in society these days seems to be based on how much money we make, how much stuff we own, or how much “shareholder value” we generate. We’ve all been atomised, lost a sense of community and forced into endless competition at our workplaces (many of which are insecure, very low-paid and often without a guaranteed income).
And as I keep pointing out, the quality of mental health services has actually declined in my experience. I’m still waiting for a re-scheduled appointment which was canceled in January. I desperately needed that. The nurses and psychiatric staff are all wonderful, but they are stressed out of their minds. My own psychiatrist told me of the horrible repercussions your NHS “reforms” have had on patient care. I am not as bad now as I once was – but had I been when all these cuts came through, had I been at my worst, I could’ve easily been another suicide statistic which IDS refuses to acknowledge. Those people aren’t even deemed worthy of public knowledge by your government.
The most vulnerable who have been hit the hardest didn’t stand a chance in the face of this government and the money men. And their blood is on the hands of this government. And, yes, I’d say the same about any government which had enacted these cruel measures.
Caron Lindsay 31st Mar ’15 – 2:46pm
“Helen, that should not be the case after 6 April when there are waiting time targets to be in place.”
Do you really believe that Caron – hand on heart?
Recently I read that there had been a 8% drop in spending – in real terms – on mental health over the last 5-years. The LibDems had a chance to help people with mental Health problems and didn’t. As the election nears they are scrambling around to find a popular high profile policy – another tuition fees – to keep them in government, it’s the lowest form of politics.
John Roffey. If Russell Brand has such a problem with capitalism then how come he doesn’t renounce all his worldly goods and take himself off to the last remaining Socialist Utopia on the planet, North Korea? All its citizens are healthy, happy and contented under the benign protection of the Dear Leader.
malc 31st Mar ’15 – 5:03pm
“Recently I read that there had been a 8% drop in spending – in real terms – on mental health over the last 5-years. The LibDems had a chance to help people with mental Health problems and didn’t. As the election nears they are scrambling around to find a popular high profile policy – another tuition fees – to keep them in government, it’s the lowest form of politics.”
If I thought the LibDems would really improve mental health services, I would, hand on heart, vote for them tomorrow and encourage everyone I know to do so. But after the tuition fee debacle how can we know they will follow through on promises? or that this would not be one of the ‘compromises of Coalition’ we are always being told about? I’m afraid my head tells me that nothing in the Lib Dem manifesto can be treated as anything other than a wish-list, ready to be sacrificed in any Coalition negotiations.
The government’s immigration policy is also doing untold damage to people’s mental health. One need only think of the loved ones kept apart by the arbitrary financial limits in the spouse visa rules, or the hideous delays which mean that (for example) there are still pre-2007 asylum claims which have not been “resolved” even though the (then Labour) government promised to resolve them all by 2011. The cruelty of lack of immigration status is particularly oppressive for children and young people, who may only gradually come to understand why they are treated differently from their friends- even once granted temporary residence they are unlikely to be able to attend university, since they are denied access to the loans now necessary to pay the fees.
@Tabman: “If Russell Brand has such a problem with capitalism then how come he doesn’t renounce all his worldly goods and take himself off to the last remaining Socialist Utopia on the planet, North Korea? ”
That’s a straw man and I think you know it.
I have a problem with capitalism myself. Or at least the type of capitalism we have now which is essentially a race to the bottom. I’ve a major problem with our current low-wage, insecure jobs. I’ve a problem with the outrageous, immoral and unwarranted amount of money CEOs, bankers and top execs pay themselves. I’ve a problem with jobs constantly being offshored, poor customer service and treatment from multinationals, and the fact that there’s no such thing as industrial democracy anymore. I hate the fact that everything is a marketing opportunity for the ad-men; can’t they just let us be for 10 minutes without always trying to manipulate us into buying more things we don’t need? And yet, I still think the free market is great for products such as technology, clothing and many other things. On the other hand, I think there are things such as health, basic utilities and public transport that are too essential to leave to market forces.
Just because someone has a problem with capitalism or the way it is currently run does not mean they want to live in an oppressive communist dictatorship.
Tabman 31st Mar ’15 – 5:17pm
“If Russell Brand has such a problem with capitalism then how come he doesn’t renounce all his worldly goods and take himself off to the last remaining Socialist Utopia on the planet, North Korea? All its citizens are healthy, happy and contented under the benign protection of the Dear Leader.”
I did say that I am not prone to quoting Russell Brand because I do find that the reasoning he applies is often conflicting – nevertheless in this case I think he is right.
No doubt you recall this Guardian headline back in January:
New Oxfam report says half of global wealth held by the 1%
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/19/global-wealth-oxfam-inequality-davos-economic-summit-switzerland
However, we knew that this was misleading as the vast majority of the wealth is held by much fewer than the top 1%.
I had not recalled to what extent until I found this later in the article:
“Oxfam made headlines at Davos last year with a study showing that the 85 richest people on the planet have the same wealth as the poorest 50% (3.5 billion people). The charity said this year that the comparison was now even more stark, with just 80 people owning the same amount of wealth as more than 3.5 billion people, down from 388 in 2010.”
The rapid decline in the numbers [from 388 to 80] since 2010 shows that this gap is widening and is going to continue to widen. Essentially, because the global free market allows the global corporations to use the cheapest labour on the planet to assemble their products – which are then sold in markets where labour rates are much higher. Smaller businesses cannot compete with this model because they do not have the clout to obtain the kind of assembly deals that the global corporations can achieve – nor the low transportation costs.
I don’t view this as capitalism – but corporatism – or perhaps more accurately – Global Feudalism. Capitalism does usually include the ‘trickle down effect’ and real competition but capitalism – in a free global market barely at all – because the profits made by these corporations is almost all removed from the location where the transaction took place [so cannot ‘trickle down’] and are spent elsewhere or stored [by HSBC in Switzerland?].
Stephen Campbell / John Roffey. Russell Brand is only interested in Russell Brand. He is a ruthless narcissist just like anyone else who gets to the top in any organisation or society. He, however, is hypocritical about it.
“He is a ruthless narcissist just like anyone else who gets to the top in any organisation or society. He, however, is hypocritical about it.”
I’m not a fan of Russell Brand in the slightest. However, just because he’s a narcissist doesn’t make him always wrong. In addition, he’s not as hypocritical as the Tory media would like you to believe:
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2015/mar/26/russell-brand-donates-profits-book-hackney-cafe
Stephen Campbell – the two most telling sentences in that article are “Thanks for coming to this thing, I feel like a minor royal” and “brandishing copies of his book”
I think that tells you all you need to know.
Tabman,
I don’t know how we ended up discussing Russell Brand and I’m not a huge fan, He’s got is views and he’s entitled to them. The idea that everyone who expresses any doubts about capitalism is really advocating communism is a bit ridiculous and the idea that everyone who earns a few bob is then a hypocrite if they think capitalism is not be all and end all of human existence is one of the great straw man arguments.. And what about arch Capitalist who get all warm and fuzzy about the economic rise of China or claim to be wealth creators when they earn their crust by undercutting the wages of other workers through exporting work to sweat shops that sometimes use child labour.
Firstly, let’s welcome this programme. At least the Lib Dems have tried to raise the profile of mental health problems and tried to break the taboo around the subject. It’s comprehensive and covers prevention, treatment and research. All three aspects of dealing with the problem are essential – although the £50 million research fund does seem a bit on the low side to be able make a real difference. (Mental illness causes 15 per cent of the country’s disease burden but received just 5 per cent of total health research spending. Source Mental Health Foundation).
The causes of mental health problems are obviously diverse but we cannot run away from that if people cannot afford proper housing and to feed their families this is going to cause stress and potential reactions such as depression. Anyone who has been an MP’s caseworker knows this. Other potential causes of depression and mental ill health are a lack of employment, debt, exploitation, bullying, domestic violence, family breakdown, bereavement, addiction and loneliness. (Source: NHS and MIND)
So we really need (i) a strong evidence base on the causes of mental ill health and (ii) to develop joined up economic and social policies – maybe even coordinated at Cabinet level – so economic policies aren’t adopted which result in unacceptable social and health costs.
In that sense @Stephen you are right these measures are just a sticking plaster. But we need the plaster until we can do better at preventing the problem.
I wrote and article for LDV about developing mental health prevention stratgies a few months ago
Sorry meant to delete that last sentence!
Phyllis
“I’m afraid my head tells me that nothing in the Lib Dem manifesto can be treated as anything other than a wish-list, ready to be sacrificed in any Coalition negotiations”
I agree, I think the current leadership would promise anything and sacrifice everything to stay in government. I’m still furious with myself for voting LibDem in 2010 – I feel like I was conned. Hopefully the Labour party will take Sheffield Hallam and Tim Farron can start rebuilding the party.
As I read online today, a 17 year old commit’s suicide because of depression and anorexia. Of course, eating does play a part in how we feel, any diabetic will explain how low sugars can effect your moods.
It is a form if control over a situation that is felt impossible to cope with. Two problems, and as I have said before, difficult to resolve.
A child blames himself for a breakdown in a relationship, this causes other issue’s, I feel that this is another area that needs some urgent thoughts. It is difficult for us to understand when we have little knowledge of this situation.