Mental Health: Children and Young People

Baroness Wyld Excerpts

Wednesday 30th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wyld (Con)]

My Lords, I shall try to make four points in four minutes. The first point is about funding. At the moment we are often working backwards, as other noble Lords have said, to help those who are already at crisis point. The Government have shown great leadership on this—I welcome the additional funding—but I am still extremely worried when consultant psychiatrists and others in the system to whom I have spoken say that the extra investment is not getting to the front line for specialist services. I am not someone who thinks that public spending is the answer to every problem, but sometimes a big part of the problem simply does come down to money, and this is one of them. I back up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, on this and ask my noble friend the Minister how the mental health investment standard, which is excellent, will help to make absolutely sure that funding is targeted at the services most under strain, particularly specialist CAMHS.

My second point is about early interventions and I will be brief. School counselling services clearly can play an important role in preventing mental distress from escalating. I have seen some brilliant examples in schools. Even at primary school level, if you put yourselves in the shoes of a child, that is still quite a late intervention. I agree with the point made by my noble friend and I urge the Government to keep up the momentum on helping families—and I stress families—in the peri and post-natal stages.

We need to be careful about a narrative where we think that A plus B will definitely prevent C. It will not, unfortunately. We should look at early intervention but some children will end up in crisis. Mental health illnesses can strike out of the blue and we need to make sure that each part of the system works properly.

My third point is about culture change. I spend a great deal of time talking to people about this. I know that some people worry that we are medicalising normal childhood or adolescent experience, as if by encouraging young people to talk about their mental health we are somehow putting ideas in their heads and stimulating a false demand that should not be there and that we cannot address.

This shows that as a society we are on such a steep learning curve—that, unbelievably, we are still at an early stage of understanding mental well-being and, at the same time, we are trying to teach our children. For me, it is the very opposite of creating epidemics of mental illness—it is about stopping them, by teaching children that anxious or unhappy feelings at certain times are normal, but they need to be given tools to manage them. We talk a lot at the moment about what sort of a country we want to be. I want my children to grow up in a society where all those who are able to be are in control of their own mental well-being. Philip Larkin famously said that:

“Man hands on misery to man”,


and while he is my favourite poet, I have never particularly liked that poem. There is always a chance to break cycles and hand on resilience rather than misery.

My last point is about joined-up government. There are so many other points I would have liked to have covered—I am running out of time—including the new Ofsted framework, transition to adult services and welfare reform. In broad terms I am delighted to see that the Government have moved to a birth-to-25 strategy, but how will this be led across government departments in practice? When I talk to people in Whitehall they emphasise how complicated this is, with many root causes and considerations. Because that is true, it is the very reason that cross-government working needs to be gripped. Every person at every level working on this should understand which interventions are intended to solve which problems, where responsibility lies and how success will be measured. We should be following the life of a child, not the silos of departments.

Finally, at my daughters’ school they often sing a song from “Matilda The Musical”. It is called “When I Grow Up”. One of the closing lines is:

“Just because I find myself in this story, it doesn’t mean that everything is written for me”.


When I watch the kids I often remember the most harrowing calls I took as a Samaritan volunteer over a decade ago from children who simply had nowhere else to turn. Sometimes children need help to write a better story. That is our job.