Mental Health

Lord Goodlad Excerpts

Thursday 15th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goodlad (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Tyler on securing this debate and on her very wise words.

I speak from the perspective of one whose home for the first 14 years of my life was a mental illness hospital: the Lawn in Lincoln—founded by the Willis family in 1819, following the successful treatment of King George III—of which my late father was for many years the medical superintendent. People have said to me, “What an unusual upbringing that must have been”—to which my only reply is, in the spirit of Elvis Presley, “She’s a distant cousin but she ain’t too distant with me”. An unusual upbringing it may have been, but it was not unusual for me. As I look back on those years, the memories of friendships with patients and staff remain with me as if it was yesterday. I see that part of my life through rose-coloured spectacles. My father wanted me to follow in his footsteps, as for some years did I. When that was not to be, grudgingly he said that my upbringing had been as good a preparation as any for life in the other place.

To be serious, much has changed since those days, most of it for the better. Public attitudes toward mental health have changed enormously, led I like to think by government and parliamentary action, and certainly reflected in Westminster today. There is a limited amount that the Government can do to influence public attitudes, and there is regrettably a very long way to go. In many ways, although progress has been made over the past 50 years, the glass is at least half empty. One in four adults during their life is traumatised by anxiety, depression, OCD, schizophrenia, dementia or another mental health condition.

The report of the noble Lord, Lord Layard, published by the LSE, sets out some stark evidence. Mental illness is now nearly half of all ill health suffered by people under 65 and it is more disabling than most physical disease. Yet only a quarter of those involved are in any form of treatment. The report of the noble Lord, Lord Layard, also pointed out that 23% of all ill health in the UK—the largest single cause of disability—is mental ill health, yet only 11% of England’s annual secondary care health budget is spent on mental health services.

My noble friend set out some of the costs—£100 billion a year, including 70 million lost working days, additional welfare benefits, lost tax receipts and the cost of treating avoidable illness. No price can be put on the suffering of those involved. Most of the millions of people suffering from depression, and children with behaviour problems, received no treatment, despite NICE’s recommendations. I hope that the Minister will be able to indicate how she thinks local authorities and clinical commissioning groups will deal with mental health care commissioning plans in the future.

There is, of course, support for the glass half full view of the situation. Premature death of people with serious mental illness has declined, although it is still too high, particularly for schizophrenia sufferers—20 years. The quality of life of many mentally ill people has improved, as has the experience of healthcare. The Royal College of General Practitioners has committed to making improved care for people with mental health problems a training priority. I well remember as a child accompanying my father in his car as we followed the tail lights of general practitioners in rural Lincolnshire on domiciliary visits. Perhaps this will not have to happen so much in future, and reference to community health teams will be quicker.

I do not doubt the good intentions of the Government and I pay tribute to the recent work of Jeremy Hunt, Norman Lamb and Simon Stevens. The Government have legislated for the first time for parity of esteem between physical and mental health. The intention is that most patients needing a talking therapy will be guaranteed treatment within six weeks, with a maximum wait of 18 weeks, and that patients experiencing their first episodes of psychosis will receive treatment within two weeks. Let us hope that these aspirations result in action—fine words butter no parsnips.

The children and young people’s mental health and well-being task force has been established. The mental health crisis concordat has been signed by 20 national organisations. The Government have announced that everyone who receives mental health care should have a named, accountable clinician. Mental health has now been made part of the new national measure of well-being so that it is more likely to be taken into account when government departments are developing and implementing policy.

My late father was one of the pioneers of day care. I am not sure that, seeing the outcome of care in the community in some of our inner cities, despite the deep commitment of carers, social workers and health workers, he would be convinced that an adequate solution has been found. What is required is a holistic approach, co-ordinating social care, general practice, liaison psychiatric and mental health specialist organisations, housing and education authorities and prisons. What we need is not just talk in Whitehall but action.

The Health and Social Care Act for the first time in statute places a duty on the NHS to promote research. It is in the context of research that I turn to schizophrenia. I pay tribute to the work of charities such as Rethink, Mind and SANE—Schizophrenia, A National Emergency —founded and so ably run for many years by Marjorie Wallace, and of which I was a director for some time. There is now a schizophrenia audit, and depressing reading it will make.

The exact causes of schizophrenia psychoses are unknown. They are among the commonest and most serious mental health conditions. Only one in 10 people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia is in work. Stigma still attaches to the condition. The human cost is colossal, the financial cost in terms of resources used is enormous and the distress to sufferers and their families is inconceivable. Schizophrenia affects about one person in 100 at some point in their life. It is estimated that it costs the UK taxpayers about £2 billion a year in care and treatment, together with the vast personal cost, both financial and in terms of suffering, for patients and family members. The global drugs bill alone is estimated to be £12.5 billion a year, not including hospital stays.

So where are we now? Last year the Harvard Gazette published an article saying that there had been little innovation in drug development for the treatment of schizophrenia in more than 60 years. It went on to report on efforts to identify,

“more than 100 locations in the human genome associated with the risk of developing schizophrenia”.

The hope is that this might lead to the development of new drugs. Despite the pressing need for treatment, medications currently on the market treat only one of the symptoms of the disorder—psychosis—and do not address the debilitating cognitive symptoms. Treatment options are limited because the biological mechanisms underlying the illness have not been understood. The sole drug target for existing treatment was found serendipitously, and no medications with fundamentally new mechanisms of action have been developed since the 1950s.

Great work is going on in the United States, financed by foundations and philanthropic donations, and there is an international project on genomes. On this side of the Atlantic, mental health has always been a poor relation in the charitable sector, with the exceptions of Alzheimer’s and autism. Mental health charities will not, in the foreseeable future, be able to compete with physical health charities, such as those devoted to cancer. That puts the Government in the firing line. The Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London has been given £5 million for a project, but nothing will come from that, I understand, for a decade. So there we are: little progress over 60 years.

I hope that the Minister will give me some comfort that the Government understand the urgency of further research into the causes of schizophrenia psychoses and the crucial role of the Government and the NHS in promoting it. Mental health has been described, with justification, as the Cinderella of the NHS—but let us remember with hope that Cinderella had a happy ending.