Meeting of the Parliament 13 June 2018
Thank you, Presiding Officer.
I agree with Neil Findlay absolutely, and I think that what he said underscores the group who are most vulnerable, who are already delivering a service and whose love of the people around them—and for whom they care—we exploit. We should look after them in their time of need.
So bad are CAMHS that, in evidence to the Health and Sport Committee, the chief accountable officer of North Lanarkshire health and social care partnership, Janice Hewitt, said that referrals to such services
“have risen in tier 3 and severe by 23 per cent”.
She also said:
“There is something not right; there is something that we are not doing right with families or children.”—[Official Report, Health and Sport Committee, 22 May 2018; c 37.]
That was a red warning flag that we should all heed. Put simply, if someone’s daughter fell off her bike and broke her arm, we could reasonably expect her to be in plaster by the end of the day. However, if she came to her parent with anxiety, depression or even self-harming behaviour, we could expect her to join the longest queue in our NHS. It is simply not good enough.
Things do not get better when people transit to adult services. Those, too, are characterised by long waits and fractured continuity of care. Many of us on the Health and Sport Committee have heard compelling stories of families who have been bereaved by suicide. One person talked about their loved one, who, in the last five months of his life, had had appointments with no less than five psychiatrists. We would not expect a cancer patient to have to see five different cancer surgeons. Every time, he had to start at the beginning, retell his story and potentially retraumatise himself over that. There is no support for families in how to look after somebody who is experiencing a suicidal tendency. There is also no provision for non-English-speaking citizens or people from other countries for whom English is not their first language.
There is also precious little training of police. The subject is only optional at Tulliallan. We need to make it mandatory because it is often the police who form the all-important first response.
I should also say that my position is not a reflection of how I view our hard-working healthcare staff, who are absolute champions of the health service and deserve our respect. They only want for training, capacity and adequate resources.
The sharpest end of this agenda should cause us all great concern: an 8 per cent increase last year in Scots taking their own lives, against a marked period of decline. Yesterday, at the Health and Sport Committee, Toni Giugliano from the Mental Health Foundation said:
“There is no longer strong ministerial guidance to local authorities on directing money towards suicide prevention.”—[Official Report, Health and Sport Committee, 12 June 2018; c 4.]
I whole-heartedly agree with that, and I hope that the Government will listen to his message.
We have come a long way in this country in getting people to finally talk about mental health and to come forward, but we do them profound harm if, once we have brought them out of the shadows and got them to recognise the problems that they are experiencing, there is a void of services to offer them. That is an unconscionable cruelty.
I say: enough. Today I am asking the Parliament to take this department under special measures and ask it to bring forward plans for how it will turn the situation around.
The mental health strategy was 500 days late and it was panned by stakeholders. We often hear the First Minister say that that delay was caused by the Health and Sport Committee, but let us be clear that only three weeks of the 68-week delay to the strategy was caused by the Health and Sport Committee, and I will not hear anybody say otherwise in this debate.
We are still waiting for the suicide strategy; it is more than 500 days late. In those 500 days, 1,000 fellow Scots have perished at their own hand. It is a human tragedy—