Meeting of the Parliament 13 June 2018
It is a great privilege to lead the debate for my party and to move the motion. In her first speech in the chamber after the 2016 election, the First Minister graciously credited my party when she announced the creation of a ministry for mental health and the post of Minister for Mental Health. We had fought for that for many years and we were gratified when it was made real.
However, after two years, the sense of common purpose that we shared on that day has all but evaporated. We can no longer find consensus with a Government that consistently lets us down so much on an issue of such importance.
We live in a Scotland in which less than half of new mothers are served by adequate perinatal mental health services, in which waiting times for child and adolescent mental health services are the worst on record and perform worse every month, and in which 1,000 adults have waited a year or more for access to a talking therapist. Against a steady decline in recent years in the implementation of the choose life suicide prevention strategy, we saw last year the terrible statistic that showed the first rise—an increase of 8 per cent—in the number of Scots who take their own lives.
The Government’s response has been an additional £30 million in the previous budget, and more money has been announced today, but that will not even cover the 800 link workers whom the Government has agreed to deploy. Two strategies have been monstrously delayed and roundly criticised by the sectors that will implement them.
I am not here to make enemies, and I like to think that I treat everybody in this chamber with respect. However, against such a powerful index of failure I am compelled to ask the Minister for Mental Health exactly what she does all day. The eyes of the most vulnerable people in this country are fixed on the Scottish Government for answers, solutions and care—and they have been left wanting.
We celebrated the creation of this ministry: it was a staging post and the first part of a much bigger vision of a comprehensive, gold-plated, copper-bottomed service that would look after people who are mentally unwell from infancy until the end of life. However, we see deficiencies in policy and provision at every level and at every single stage in that process.
As I said at the start, in Scotland there is a likelihood of less than half that a new mum with anxiety or depression as a result of her pregnancy will be seen by adequate perinatal mental health services. There is no standardised training of general practitioners, midwives or health visitors. The chances are that we do not even know about a child with any kind of trauma as a result of an adverse childhood experience, because we are not capturing that information. I thought that it was very telling that, in giving evidence to the Health and Sport Committee about his review of national health service targets and indicators, the former chief medical officer for Scotland Sir Harry Burns said that the one thing that we should be measuring—and are not—is young people who have experienced ACEs. Similarly, a young person identified as having anxiety, depression or self-harming behaviour can wait for up to two years for first-line treatment. If they need admission for tier 4 crisis bed support, there is every chance that they will be turned away because there are insufficient staff there to tend them.