Meeting of the Parliament 13 June 2018
Scottish Liberal Democrats have, over the years, consistently sought to keep the spotlight on mental health. We have repeatedly used the time that is available to us in the chamber to highlight concerns that, I am sure, we all share about lack of progress, and to demand from ministers the sort of response that does justice to the scale of the challenge that we face, so that mental health gets the priority that it needs and deserves.
My colleague Alex Cole-Hamilton vividly set out the scale of that challenge, the failure to match Government rhetoric with effective and timely action, and the alarming evidence that shows that it appears that in key areas we are, far from making progress, going backwards.
I do not doubt the sincerity of the minister’s commitment and, as most people did, I welcomed her appointment as the dedicated Minister for Mental Health. However, that has not by any measure resulted in the step change that is needed to address mental health issues.
In CAMHS, we are seeing the worst performance against waiting time targets since the current targets were established in December 2014. Children and young people who need help are waiting longer and/or travelling further for that support.
For psychological therapies, the picture appears to be little better, as the Government’s target is now being met in only one health board area. In the meantime, the number of adults who are waiting over a year for treatment has doubled to 1,000 since the minister was appointed. Shocking as that figure is, it should not be taken as criticism of the staff who work in our mental health services, who do outstanding work despite lacking the resources and support that they need.
Although turning the situation around will take time, the Scottish Government’s apparent lack of urgency, or lack of recognition of the scale of what is needed, is alarming. The approach to suicide prevention illustrates that perfectly. Like the mental health strategy, the suicide prevention strategy was allowed to lapse. When a draft was finally published 18 months late, it fell woefully short of what was needed. Samaritans branded it “very disappointing”. The Mental Health Foundation Scotland suggests that it
“has significant gaps and lacks clarity over fundamental issues, including resourcing, timescales, structures”
and
“the future of Choose Life”.
It is one thing for the Government to take its time to make sure that it gets things right, but it is quite another for it to drag its heels for months and then to come up with a strategy that patently falls far short of what is needed.
Again the Mental Health Foundation Scotland hit the nail on the head when it pointed out that
“while mental health has taken a more prominent place on the political agenda over the past decade, suicide prevention has lost impetus and drive at both national and local levels”.
The foundation calls for a radical redesign, strong national leadership and efforts to recapture the impetus that was seen during the early years of the choose life programme, when the number of suicides fell significantly.
That certainly strikes a chord with me in terms of what I see locally in Orkney. For example, in recent correspondence the minister assured me that Orkney had a choose life co-ordinator, but then named the chair of the local choose life group, who does excellent work but is not in a position to co-ordinate activity in Orkney, far less to do so across the region. Moreover, the local group has no access to any resources, which means that it has no chance of undertaking the sort of work that saw choose life make such an impact in its early years.
Although suicides in Scotland have been on a downward trend, the most recent figures show a disturbing reversal of that trend. I hope that it is just a blip, but it reinforces the urgency for Government to up its game on leadership, resources and timescale.
On average, every day in Scotland two people take their own lives. Each is a tragedy and each is devastating for the people who are left behind, but each needs to be seen in the context that suicide is preventable. As the Mental Health Foundation Scotland rightly put it,
“No caring society or government should tolerate the suffering and despair that leads a person to take their own life.”
I therefore urge Parliament to support the motion in Alex Cole-Hamilton’s name, and the Labour and Conservative amendments, and to send a strong message that we believe that treatment of mental ill health deserves the same priority as treatment of physical ill health.