Hansard

I certainly will. Every additional pound that is spent on mental health is welcome, but every extra pound that the Government spends on an unwanted independence referendum is a yet another pound that is not spent on it.

The Government refuses to acknowledge that Scotland faces a mental health crisis: its amendment does so again today. It is not rocket science to work out that for a problem to be solved, it must first be acknowledged. That was why this Parliament declared a climate emergency. We must now declare a mental health emergency to drive change, to ramp up services and to improve intervention and prevention.

The changes that I want could have been set out in my motion. There should be local, direct and fast access to help wherever and whenever someone needs it. The mental health workforce should be expanded. There should be no more long journeys for those who seek treatment. All the good things that I want are made harder if we cannot get over the first hurdle, which is to agree that there is a crisis.

The situation in our schools was urgent 15 months ago. The number of days that have been lost to mental ill health by teachers and school support staff has risen from more than 140,000 in 2017-18 to more than 180,000 in 2019-20. The children and young people whom they teach are meant to be supported by a guarantee that they will be treated within 18 weeks. That is a long time for anyone who faces mental ill health, such as an eating disorder, post-traumatic stress or suicidal thoughts. However, even that target is not met in two out of five cases. That was true before the pandemic and it is true now. There has also been no change in the record number of children waiting for more than a year for treatment.

As I have said many times, if one’s daughter fell off her bike and broke her arm, one could reasonably expect her to be in plaster by the end of the day. As it is, if she came with profound anxiety and self-harming behaviour she would join the longest queue in the national health service.

Staff are working hard round the clock, but they have never had the resources or support that they need to meet the considerable demand that they face. We know that in-patient care is struggling. I have raised many times the case of David Ramsay, who took his own life after being turned away from Carseview in Tayside. His niece Gilly messaged me today to say that that kind of thing is still happening, and with tragic consequences.

I do not doubt the Scottish Government’s concern for the mental health of people across the country, but we must acknowledge that there is a crisis, if the response is to match its scale. Liberal Democrats have determinedly pressed the Cabinet Secretary for Finance to improve funding for mental health services. Extra resources are welcome and are a good start to the Government taking a better approach to mental health, but if Parliament agrees to our motion to declare that Scotland faces a mental health emergency, we must go further.

I will end by echoing the sentiments of the First Minister, which is not something that I do often. When answering questions from a panel of young people in 2019, the First Minister said:

“On mental health, we still don’t do enough ... and we don’t do it well enough.”

She certainly was not wrong.

We understand a crisis to be

“a sequence of events at which the trend of all future events is determined.”

We were in a mental health crisis 14 or 15 months ago: we have been in it for a long time and the Government has failed to act. I appeal to the Government not to make the same mistake this time.

The debate is an opportunity for members of all parties to come together and acknowledge the situation in Scotland’s mental health for what it is: a crisis. In doing so, we can help to ensure that the Government and other public agencies work together to take meaningful action on the scale that is necessary for, and equal to, the challenge of the crisis.

I move,

That the Parliament recalls its resolution on the debate on motion S5M-20035 on mental health on 27 November 2019, and now recognises that there is a mental health crisis in Scotland.