Jeremy Hunt and the Tories are a scary prospect for Britain's mental health
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Version 0 of 1. This week, news crackled over the hospital radio that Jeremy Hunt – a man who once said he didn’t understand how Alastair Campbell could be depressed as it looked like he had “a great life” – is to remain as health secretary. Hunt, who previously called criticism of his mental health record by Sue Bailey, the former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, “extraordinary” (because what would she know?), has never been known for his nuance on the issue of mental health. Related: NHS mental health care ‘pushed to breaking point by lack of beds’ There have already been concerns raised by experts about whether the money pledged to mental health in the Conservative party’s pre-election budget will see the light of day. The Conservatives have told us nothing about where their £12bn of welfare cuts will land, or the estimated £30bn cuts across the board. This, and the Mental Health Policy Group estimates 2 million more adults in the UK will experience mental health issues by 2030. It’s been mooted that part of Labour’s failure during the election campaign was a lack of narrative and an inability to tell real-life, resonant stories. Well, here is a story: I have been a psychiatric inpatient. I have tried all of the drugs, all of the combinations of Xs and Zs, all of the packets with go-faster stripes. I have almost died pitting them against myself. I dropped out of school too many times to mention, have drawn blades across skin and kept curtains drawn for months and have known, unequivocally, that I am worthless. Here is another story: that of 34-year-old Martin Strain who, after being told he would have to wait four months to see a therapist under the coalition’s much vaunted Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme, took his life. Related: Q&A with Jonny Benjamin: #FindMike campaigner with schizophrenia Then there is Jonny Benjamin, perhaps familiar to readers from Channel 4’s The Stranger on the Bridge, which documented the time a man helped talk him down from jumping from Waterloo bridge. Benjamin, who now writes and campaigns on mental health issues, has schizoaffective disorder. He tells me: “I know people with mental health issues who have been waiting years to get the help they need. Imagine if they were suffering from a physical illness and were told to wait two years for treatment? It simply wouldn’t happen. There would be uproar.” Mark Brown, editor of One in Four magazine and founder of A Day in the Life, a project documenting mental health, agrees. “What I’ve seen, and experienced myself, is that everyday life with a mental health difficulty is often a struggle. One that isn’t obvious; isn’t headline grabbing; but one that makes a mess of lives if there isn’t support, help and protections.” In 2011, pledges abounded in the coalition’s “No Health Without Mental Health” strategy document, and yet the situation worsened exponentially. A month after the document was published, the National Mental Health Development Unit was scrapped. The Child and Adolescent Mental Health service (Camhs) was cut by £50m in real terms during parliament, despite an apparent £54m having been invested in child access to therapies. In fact, over the course of the coalition, there was an 8% cut in real terms to mental health trust budgets – or almost £600m – at a time when referrals to community mental health teams rose by 20%. The number of mental health beds available in inpatient facilities has dropped by 12% since 2011, while the number of patients sent out-of-area for treatment has more than doubled. Thirteen percent of spending on an area that makes up almost a quarter of the burden of the NHS gives the lie to the much-parroted “parity of esteem” line regarding physical and mental health. 60% of waiting time breaches are down to a lack of qualified staff in mental health. If the received wisdom is correct, the Conservatives won the election because people trust them with the economy, but recent policies on mental health are blasting economic progress and productivity. Poor mental health is costing the UK economy £105bn per year, including £8bn per year in sickness absence, and a further £15bn in lost productivity absenteeism (where people are at work, but under-performing due to mental health issues). ‘Kind words do not soothe the dead’ I remember, a few years ago, seeing a series of pictures taken by New Zealand photographer Robin Hammond that has stayed with me. Hammond documented the brutality of the treatment of mentally ill people in parts of Africa. Here in the UK, if to a lesser extent, this is our reality too. We see this in the muttering, cursing woman we cross the street to avoid; we hear it in the announcement of delays on the Victoria line in the morning; we read about the teenage girl who was locked in a prison cell as there were no beds available; and about the seven people who took their lives when they, too, were denied care. Politicians, for the most part, are not bad people I know that there are politicians who care about mental health, including Andy Burnham and Sarah Wollaston. I’m hopeful about the appointment of, if not Hunt, his minister Alistair Burt. And I appreciate that Norman Lamb, the former Lib Dem care minister, had good intentions in the policies he tried to implement (less so in the scrapping of the survey to measure their effectiveness), but clearly I don’t agree that they worked. Kind words do not soothe the dead. Before the election, a letter was written with a multitude of signatures to a broadsheet newspaper. No, not that one. But 442 psychotherapists, counsellors and therapists calling the state of mental health under the coalition “profoundly disturbing”. Removing proper care with swingeing cuts and replacing it with “state therapy” in the form of back-to-work schemes for those not recovered from illness was a “malign development”, the letter said. Related: Austerity and a malign benefits regime are profoundly damaging mental health | Letter Because this is what is happening right now: a system of disgust and intolerance that does not tackle root causes or allow time for recovery, but prefers to cast aspersions, antithetical to helping an individual become well, contribute to society, get back into employment, to pay taxes. Atos might be gone, but soon we will have its replacement, Maximus. Trust me, nobody wants to have a mental illness – and I would happily write that in stone. “There is no money” read the infamous note from Liam Byrne. But I’m afraid there is no compassion. We are waving – the activists; the mental health service users and their friends and families; the doctors and nurses and social workers and carers; and yet still, still, we are drowning. |