Hansard

Thank you, convener. I am grateful to have the opportunity to be here in support of Karen McKeown, the petitioner. As everyone knows, Karen’s partner, Luke Henderson, died by suicide in December 2017, so this is a difficult time for her, her children and the wider family. We meet at a time that can be difficult for many of our constituents. Many of us welcomed the opportunity to take part in a debate in Parliament on male suicide. That debate will now have to wait until the new year but the issues are of concern to all of us. I am grateful to the committee because the session with the cabinet secretary and his officials has been great in the sense that he is not trying to put any spin on the matter. I know that he is sincere about the challenges. It was reassuring that, at the beginning, he said that, although there might be a different outlook about the process for getting there, he, the Government and Karen McKeown want the same thing. To be frank, one suicide is one too many. We can examine the numbers and data, which is important—targets have a role to play because we have to monitor progress—but we are all here because we want to save lives. Committee members have asked pertinent questions, including about the wider impact on families and communities. I have been scribbling some notes. We are rightly focused on what happens within the NHS—primary care, access to general practitioners, NHS 24, mental health harms and so on—but there is a wider piece of work to do. Therefore, it is good that the committee has kept the petition open. I have made notes about employers and education because we all have to become more literate about mental health. To be frank, I struggle to signpost constituents to the right place as a regional MSP working across two different health boards and three different local authorities. Pilot schemes are welcome, but it can be difficult to know what the pathway is. All the MSPs sitting in this committee room might have different systems and procedures to which to point people. Karen’s partner Luke had a history of mental illness. She has highlighted the point that she and Luke knew how to ask for help, so they did the right things. They reached out many times and still could not get the help that they needed. I welcome the work that is in the pipeline for next year and do not doubt the good intentions of the cabinet secretary and the Government but we have serious problems with resourcing and workforce, of which the committee is well aware. I want to pay tribute to the workforce because what I am seeing increasingly is a workforce that is struggling, and that is having an impact on their mental health and wellbeing. We have to be honest about that. 12:15 The cabinet secretary is absolutely right and it is good to hear that he can take a wider view because of his background in justice and so on. Karen McKeown and I met the former Minister for Mental Health, Sport and Wellbeing after I raised this tragic case with the First Minister a number of years ago, and we talked about some of the issues that Paul Sweeney has gone into today, such as drug disorders and alcohol. We have not talked about alcohol but it is a big issue. Clare Haughey, who was the minister at the time and had been a mental health professional, told us that the strand of work was for her public health colleague and she was the mental health minister. We must get away from that siloed thinking, and we are seeing some progress on that. The petition is so important because the constructive challenge needs to continue, and I am sure that the cabinet secretary would welcome that. We do not yet have answers about resourcing and how we are going to deliver on the good intentions. That is what Karen McKeown talks about in the petition. Without going into detail about individual constituents and others in different parts of Scotland, I know people who, this week, phoned their general practitioner to try to get an appointment to discuss their mental health and the fact that they are struggling dozens of times, even over a hundred times, in two days. Colleagues have previously raised that issue with the cabinet secretary in the chamber and it is the reality. How do we close the gap between what we want people to think is on offer for them to have hope and know that they are not alone and the reality of the waiting times that some people experience? I have lots of statistics here about people in Lanarkshire, for example, who are waiting for several months, if not years, for psychological therapy. We need to go into granular detail about how we are going to do that. Again, like everyone else, I pay tribute to Karen McKeown. I know that she is listening today because I am looking at my phone and I see that she has been messaging me. This is a difficult time for families with lived experience, but I hope that they know that we, as a Parliament, are taking the issue seriously.