Mental Health: Young People

Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Hastings of Scarisbrick (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, am deeply grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for allowing us to debate this issue. I am very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, for framing the very remarks I would have made myself so I shall admit to needing to refer to similar matters.

This debate has given me the opportunity to reflect on what it means to be the parent of an adopted child who came from a severely drug-disabled parent and therefore spent the early months of his life in an incubator without contact with adults and then developed significant distress disorders, which we live with now in his adult years. That led me to look at the detail of the research and to realise that mental disorder is often picked out as being about the distress that a young person or individual may feel, rather than necessarily being about a strict form of behaviour. Anxiety and distress lie behind the statistics from Young Minds, which I found very painful, of the high levels of male and female suicide—tragically, the girls are slightly beaten by the boys. That led me to reflect on how as parents we have responded to the needs of our youngest son.

In my son’s distress and confusion, and very often in his pursuit of answers, more than just parents have been necessary to assist him. As I looked at the report, I realised that there may well be a limitation on how we understand the role of parenting as defined as those who have a direct birth or adoptive responsibility. In our case, the wider community of parents—those from the church community, the local garden centre, the café and the Outward Bound community; those connected to the school; those who have been adoptive uncles and good friends in the wider area and those whom he can drop in on in the shops—those people do not fit the category of “parent” but they are parenting. They are providing a context of security, a relationship and a place of identity, and it is that network of identities that gives security to young men and women who long to find a place in which they can reveal their minds and hearts and release their distress. I hope that we will begin to move away from the liberal consensus that defines security only in relation to those by whom a child is cosseted for their protection to a more open approach to allow our communities, as would be the case in more traditional societies in other continents, to love a child in a community.