Meeting of the Parliament 25 September 2018
I thank the minister for advance sight of her statement.
Everyone wants mental health to be on an equal footing with physical health. However, the reality is that the Scottish Government is nowhere near achieving that parity, regardless of its warm words. We welcome the appointment of Dame Denise Coia as the chair of the children and young people’s mental health task force, but Audit Scotland’s recently published report “Children and young people’s mental health” told us that services for young people are “complex and fragmented”.
CAMHS features heavily in the programme for government. Will the minister assure the Parliament that funding for mental health workers in our schools will not come from existing mental health or education budgets? Will she also assure us about how transition care plans will be monitored, given the existing problems with CAMHS?
We welcome the distress brief intervention treatment that 1,000 people have received in Aberdeen, Lanarkshire, the Borders and Highland. The programme tackles the mental health of drug and alcohol abusers. There have been cuts to alcohol and drug treatment in the past decade, so when will the distress brief intervention programme be rolled out across Scotland? Will funding be increased year on year to tackle areas with high levels of deprivation and poverty, which result in higher levels of drug and alcohol addiction?