Hansard

I start by congratulating Clare Haughey on bringing forward this important debate, particularly as we are in mental health awareness week. I thank the charity behind the everyone’s business campaign and all the campaigners, all the clinicians and, indeed, all the charities that are involved in mental health for their efforts, not just this week but throughout the year.

It is important to recognise that the campaign is about supporting the individual and that perinatal mental health issues impact on the individual for the rest of their life. They also impact on their family life, their social life and their working life, and on their children. It is about health outcomes for the mother, but it is also about health and life outcomes for the child. That is why the campaign is so important. People need access to specialist and wraparound services. However, to make that happen, we need a change of culture—a change in how we think about mental health. I will tell members what I mean by that.

We often mention the statistic that one in three of us will have a mental health issue at some point in our lives. I prefer to think about that as every one of us being on a spectrum of mental health throughout our lives. Thinking about it in that way can help us to change the culture—to change where the resource goes, where the workforce goes and how we not only address the stigma but back up the commitment to tackle mental health problems with the services that people need. Those services include perinatal mental health services.

We also need to address antenatal depression, postnatal depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders—women need support in all those areas. However, we should consider providing that support in different places. We should consider perinatal mental health not only straight after a child is born but when the woman goes back into the workplace. We must think about what happens in the workplace and how we can provide access to better mental health services there. If the woman is going back to the university or college sector, how do we give her better support and better access to mental health services there?

Crisis services are a specific challenge—we heard about that during First Minister’s questions. We ask people to wait days on end to see a general practitioner, and then sometimes weeks, if not months, to see a counsellor or psychologist. For many people, that delay can literally become a life-or-death matter. Someone who breaks their leg will be seen by an accident and emergency department within four hours, even though they will not lose their life. However, if someone who has a serious mental health crisis is not seen quickly, that can mean the end of their life. We need to change the culture in relation to crisis centres. It is really important to back them with resource.

We also need to think about how we provide care in the community. First, we need to consider how we deliver direct services, whether that is in an acute setting or a primary care setting and whether it is through access to a counsellor in the workplace, in a college or on a university campus, or access to an emergency service in a crisis centre. However, it is also important that, in the community, we have genuinely local crisis teams that identify individuals who need wraparound support.

Yesterday, I read about the case of someone who tried to access a local crisis team in their community. They had a history of mental health issues but were turned away. Four hours later, the police picked that person up from a well-known suicide site at a bridge in the west of Scotland. That is a stark example of the need for better thinking in relation to our crisis teams. Alongside that, we must consider the workforce and how we can get more clinical psychologists and counsellors into all those places to support perinatal women, as well as all women and, indeed, all our citizens, throughout their lives.

I welcome the everyone’s business campaign and thank Clare Haughey for bringing the debate to the chamber. I hope that members can work collectively to give mental health the priority that it needs and back that up with services, resources and the workforce.