Meeting of the Parliament 17 May 2023
This week is mental health awareness week, and this year’s official theme is anxiety. More than half of Scots who were surveyed said that anxiety interferes in their daily lives, and, although it is natural to be anxious, for some people those feelings might not go away. They might get worse or not have a particular cause and become a problem, especially if people do not know what the feelings are or why they are happening. Everyone’s experience of anxiety is different, and not everyone who has anxiety will experience the same symptoms.
Anxiety can become debilitating and affect a person’s performance at work and their personal life. In 2008, that happened to me. There was not one cause but several challenges that I faced—physical pain from an injury, pressure at work and the death of a close friend. I needed time off work. I was lucky—I received support from my employer through their employee assistance programme and, after six weeks, I was on a phased return to work. As I said, I was fortunate. The counselling was arranged quickly and the sessions happened in regular succession.
On the SNP’s watch, Scots across the country are waiting far too long for mental health treatment. CAMHS is the main route to assessment and treatment for children and young people seeking help with their mental health, but we should remember that the SNP has never met its CAMHS target and adult waiting times are still nowhere near good enough. In 2022, almost 9,000 children were refused mental health treatment. Between January and June this year, 4,640 referrals to CAMHS were rejected. Long delays in accessing treatment can lead to more entrenched difficulties by the time a child or young person is able to access a service. Failing to solve the CAMHS crisis today will lead to poor mental health outcomes for future generations, further compounding the issue.
However, it is not just CAMHS that is in crisis under the SNP. The SNP Government froze the mental health budget for 2023-24. Just this weekend, the outgoing Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland, Bruce Adamson, said that Nicola Sturgeon had failed to address the issue of children’s mental health. The First Minister, Humza Yousaf, pledged to recruit an additional 1,000 mental health specialists when he was the cabinet secretary for health, but that has been delayed. There is a shortage of mental health beds across Scotland, and there are 190 CAMHS vacancies in Scotland.
Let us not forget that our existing staff are absolutely critical to delivering these services and they are clearly working at the extreme end of their professional capacity, so we must be hyper-aware of their mental wellbeing. Knowing healthcare professionals as I do, I am well aware of how low down the priority list they put their own health and wellbeing. That is evident in the data that was presented in the press over the weekend. Between 2018 and 2022, almost 75,000 NHS staff members missed work due to anxiety, stress, depression or other mental health issues.
As the largest staffing group in the NHS mental health workforce, nursing staff play a key role in the delivery of services. However, current levels of staff absence due to anxiety, depression and other mental health-related illnesses are extremely worrying. Nursing staff across NHS Scotland are telling us that staff shortages are impacting on their ability to provide safe care for patients and on both their own and their colleagues’ wellbeing.
After 16 years in government, the SNP seems to be out of ideas when it comes to tackling mental health. We must look after our existing workforce and help them to keep well so that they can look after the wellness of our population. We need a fresh approach that incorporates modern, efficient, and local solutions into healthcare.