National Marriage and Mental Health Awareness Weeks

Barbara Keeley Excerpts

Thursday 16th May 2019 Westminster Hall

[Barbara Keeley (Worsley and Eccles South) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this debate with you in the chair, Sir David. I congratulate the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) on securing the debate, and I thank hon. Members who have contributed to mark this unusual mix of Mental Health Awareness and National Marriage weeks.

Many points have been made on the value of marriage and family life, including in the excellent opening speech by the hon. Member for Congleton and by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon)—I think I beat him by two years in how long I have been married. Happy anniversary for each of our relationships. The hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) focused on family relationship issues and poverty, and the role of family breakdown.

In line with my brief, I want to bring this debate back to mental health, because it is Mental Health Awareness week and we could explore some issues there, too. I feel that, no matter how strong a family are, there will be times when they need support from outside—when they need the services that the state can provide to help them to cope. If those services are not there when they need them, it can cause immense strain for everyone involved. This is every bit as true for mental health as it is for physical health services.

We do not expect families to cope with a broken leg or a cardiac problem on their own, so we should not expect them to cope with depression or an eating disorder without professional support. I want to question whether we really are doing all we can for families where one child is living with a mental health condition and they need help. Whatever our best intentions, the fact is that we are not yet doing the best we can for children and families.

According to the British Medical Association, spending on mental health care equates to only 11% of our UK NHS budget, despite accounting for 23% of the burden of disease in the UK. As we know, there is increasing demand for mental health care, with patient numbers increasing across a range of conditions. It might be time to look at that number and decide whether it should be greater, particularly for children and young people. We know that one in eight five to 19-year-olds has at least one mental disorder, but that only 6% of the mental health budget is spent on services for children and young people. I believe it is time we questioned that, because such a gap has serious consequences for children and young people with mental health conditions.

Some 400,000 children and young people who have a mental health condition do not get to see a professional at all. Instead, they have to cope with informal support. More than one in four of the children and young people referred to specialist child and adolescent mental health services in 2016-17 did not have their referral accepted. As the Children’s Society analysis showed us last year—it is a very disturbing statistic—a quarter of 14-year-old girls and nearly one in 10 boys had self-harmed in a year.

I commend Sky News and their reporter Paul Kelso for a great piece of investigative work that sheds light on the experiences of children and young people in private mental health units, many of which take young people hundreds of miles from their homes and families. The report of this work was shown yesterday. One such young person is Natasha, who is now rebuilding her life after a lost decade spent in such units. Natasha has anorexia and escalating self-harm, and she hit crisis point when she was only 12. She then spent 10 years in private mental health units dotted around the country. She says she reached her lowest point in a mental health unit in a privately run hospital in Maidenhead. In that unit, she experienced brutal restraint, which she describes as follows:

“They would pin you up against the wall, smack your head against the wall, drag you across floors, wrap you round doorframes...People sat on your head and on your legs…this would be big men, not women.”

That was the unit where she said she did

“the worst amounts of self harm”

that she had ever done in her life. Despite Natasha’s history of self-harm, she was left unattended with razors and cut herself 26 times. She needed 200 stitches.

The constant threat of self-harm is a massive strain and worry for parents when their daughter is hundreds of miles away. A mother with a daughter in one of the units that was shown in the Sky News film described how when she wakes up she thinks, “Is she all right? Will she manage to achieve her self-harm aim today?” She added, “You are hundreds of miles away. If anything happened, you would not get there on time.” As the Sky News report showed, the toll of self-harm and suicide in these units is too high. Natasha explained how she lost 24 of her friends to suicide in such mental health units, including three or four in one unit alone.

Hon. Members here today will know how it feels when a desperate constituent tells us about their child’s mental health condition and the struggle they face being unable to get their child access to the services they need. This is intolerable. We have seen mental health services being underfunded—I know the Minister will tell me about the future funding that is coming in, but we have to think about where we are today—and we know that mental health budgets fell by nearly 8% between 2010 and 2015. Sadly, we are still seeing one in 10 commissioning groups unable to meet the investment standard expected of them by the Government, which means they are failing to give mental health services the funding priority they need. We must do better than that.

In 2017, Labour set out a clear plan for how we would do better than that. I want to touch on those points. Over the past decade, mental health spending has been a part of broader NHS budgets, but as budget pressures emerged, NHS trusts and commissioning groups raided their mental health budgets to prop up services elsewhere. To that end—I know the Government have not been keen on this—Labour would ring-fence mental health budgets, which is important to ensure that the money that those services need is not siphoned off to fill gaps elsewhere.

As we think about children, young people and their families, it is important that we question why only 6% of mental health spending goes to services targeted at children and young people, despite them making up some 22% of the population. Labour would dramatically increase the proportion of the mental health budget spent on children and young people.

Following on from what I said about yesterday’s Sky News programme, we would end the disgraceful practice of sending people hundreds of miles for mental health treatment when there is no good reason to do so. In the past year, sadly we have seen the number of inappropriate out-of-area placements rise from 640 to 720, despite a Government pledge to reduce their use. I see these out-of-area placements as a tragedy for families. They jeopardise the recovery of people receiving treatment and force parents and other family members to travel long distances to support the young person. With Mental Health Awareness Week, let us not persist in treating mental health as the Cinderella service of the NHS, and children and young people’s services as the Cinderella service inside that Cinderella service.

My plea is this. Let us help children and young people in need at the time of their need, rather than making them wait 18 months to get specialist support or letting them end up in very long-term placements in locked mental health units far from home. Let us do something about the fact that the number of autistic people detained in inappropriate in-patient facilities on dubious mental health grounds remains stubbornly high, and includes a rise in the number of children in what have been seen as modern-day asylums. Let us do better. We can do better than this for our children and young people and their families.

[Sir David Amess (in the Chair)]

Just before the Minister responds, I should have announced at the start that, because the second debate was cancelled, this debate could actually continue until 4.30 pm. I will leave it with hon. Members.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

That is a very good point. We can expect employers to start doing things when they can see a return for themselves. It is interesting also that, as we reach higher levels of employment and as an appropriately skilled workforce is harder to come by, employers see the advantage of giving more help and support to their staff in order to retain them and keep them productive. We look forward to seeing more of that. Certainly our work through “Thriving at Work” with Mind, Paul Farmer and Lord Stevenson is designed to share best practice and encourage more.

My hon. Friend also talked about the long waits for children’s mental health services, which the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley) also talked about. We have to concede that, historically, children’s mental health services have been very poorly funded and supplied, and we are dealing with the aftermath of that now. Everyone knows the extent of our ambition to deliver much improved mental health services to children and young people. However, we still have to properly address the situation that we have inherited. We are playing catch-up, but we will push forward and make sure that children have access to services. The mental health support teams are the first point of contact for children, helping them look after their own wellbeing.

[Barbara Keeley]

One interesting point, which I did not make, from the piece of work that I referred to from yesterday is that placements for children and young people in private units of the type that I talked about are more expensive. They can be £500,000, £600,000 or £700,000 a year, whereas support in the community would doubtless not be as much as that. They would not be 200 miles away from the families, and they would have the support that they need.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

I agree completely. The reason why we have so many children in out-of-area placements—which, as the hon. Lady says, are expensive—is that there has not been sufficient support in the community. Nor has it been available early enough to give the children support. They have been badly failed. It has done them harm and made them more ill. The issue of out-of-area placements is of massive concern to me. I am making it a personal priority to fix it. I am concerned that, because it is seen as a specialised area of commissioning for NHS England, it commissions a quantum of beds, but that is what leads to them being out of area, and children are referred to them. We all know that their recovery will be much better if they are in their support networks near their friends and families.

When the system works well, it is absolutely inspirational. I visited an intensive care unit in east London last year. A young lady had come out the other side, having gone in for treatment for self-harm and anorexia. She was very clear that being able to undergo treatment while still being able to attend school was crucial to her recovery. To me, that seems compelling. I am deeply unhappy at the extent to which out-of-area placements are still being used. I am afraid there will probably be a need for them until we can be properly confident in our community services to work more effectively, but I am sure we all agree that we need to tackle it as soon as we can.

I enjoyed listening to the observations of the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) about what makes a happy marriage. He is right that hard work is a big part of it.

The hon. Gentleman also shared the length of marriage in his family. This year, my parents are celebrating 50 years of marriage. Having lived with them for 21 of those, I have to say that that is quite an achievement. Obviously, it takes real work. As he says, quite often we do not like our partners, but clearly, notwithstanding the difficulties, they give us comfort and security. Not having a support network to rely on, whether that is a partner, wider family or friends, makes life a lot more difficult. I recognise that some relationships will be rollercoasters. Pressures, such as financial debts, can cause untold difficulties in relationships. There will be times when people need support and we need to make it easy for them to ask for it. We have heard several references to organisations that try to give support to couples, such as Relate. A problem shared is a problem halved—we need to encourage more of that.

I was horrified by the story that the hon. Gentleman shared of the couple neither of whom wanted custody of their children. That suggests that they were the product of dysfunctional families, which is another thing to consider. If we leave children to grow up in dysfunctional families, they will repeat that experience. We need to try to do better to improve the quality of family relationships, because that would be good for society. When we look at the back stories of people who end up in prison, we see that there were no end of opportunities where they came into contact with the state, either at school or in other ways. That is a failure for us and we need to tackle it.

It is always a pleasure to listen to my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire, who really is a social justice warrior. Again, he brought home clearly the effect of the state applying process to everything and forgetting the humanity of people. We need to be more sensitive about how we intervene supportively. The institutions and the way we organise society can be excessively intimidating and formal, which is not the way to deal with people who need more emotional support. We need to think carefully about what sort of agencies should do that. The beauty of schools, and directing support via schools, is that they are not intimidating or formal institutions. Parents and children have peer support there, over and above their actual attendance, from friends and other people attending and taking their children.

We need to look at the avenues for engagement with people and make sure that they are fit for purpose, and to recognise that all Departments have a role in that. We siloise that contact. Mrs Bloggs takes little Jimmy to school, has a nice relationship and feels that they are being supported, but when she goes to the Department for Work and Pensions, she is treated as an operational performance and it is dehumanising. That is where we need to be more joined-up in the support that we are giving to families. There is a lot to learn. State institutions rely on process to ensure uniformity and fairness, but that does not always lead to good outcomes.

As my hon. Friend said, Governments are expected to do everything, but for the reasons I have outlined they are not always best placed to do that. Sometimes, rather than inventing processes and grand programmes, we should look more actively at letting 1,000 flowers bloom. Where third-sector organisations bring value, we should look at directly commissioning more services from them. That is the case in respect of mental health, because not all support for people suffering mental ill-health is clinical. Quite often, they will benefit from support that just helps them to get through life. That is something that third-sector organisations can do well. I have challenged clinical commissioning groups to look more actively at what they can do, because they will be able to deliver more care by not always relying on clinical staff.

I greatly enjoyed listening to the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady). He is wearing a fetching tartan and I am jealous that we have only the green ribbons. I will think about how we can outdo the Scottish tartan for Mental Health Awareness Week next year. He reminded us that it has been quite a week for mental health and mentioned the axing of “The Jeremy Kyle Show”. The incident that preceded that axing is a wake-up call; it shows that dysfunctional families have become entertainment. What does that say about how we operate as a society? I hope this gives everybody an opportunity for some self-reflection; it is not something that we should use for entertainment.

[Barbara Keeley]

I wanted to refer to what the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) said about detoxifying issues, which is important. The worst thing that I have read about “The Jeremy Kyle Show” is not that it focused on dysfunctional families, but that it set people against each other in an aggressive way, so it needed bouncers and security staff on hand to part people. The programme seems to have used a toxic formula, which is something that the House could look at through an inquiry, because that could persist in other types of filming. Clearly, it has had a tragic outcome, which, given the Minister’s brief, we have to take seriously.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

I share that view. By definition, if people are making TV that is designed to be entertaining, it will be manipulative and exploitative. A good friend of mine went on “I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!”—not the person who was an hon. Member, but someone else. He told me in great detail about how situations were manipulated to generate conflict. Because he is already a celebrity, he is resilient and well equipped for that, but we can imagine that for people who are not, and for whom being in the public eye is new, the risk of harm is significant. I understand that the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee will be looking at the issue, and I welcome that inquiry. If someone switches on the TV, there will be any number of reality TV shows on—often because, in truth, they are cheap to make. Given their proliferation, perhaps we ought to have some standards that producers should respect.

Another example—this shows how much rubbish I watch on TV—is the axing of “Celebrity Big Brother” earlier this year, or perhaps last year, because of an incident between two celebrities on it. I think the public showed such revulsion because they were celebrities whom the public perceived they knew. If it had been the non-celebrity version and they were two strangers, I doubt that there would have been the same reaction. That tells us that, actually, we have all been manipulated by it. It is only when something terrible happens that we stand back and think, “Hang on a minute, we shouldn’t be doing this.” But here we are.

The hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South made some very fair criticisms about the challenges to children and young people’s mental health. I agree that one of the reasons that we are where we are is that, historically, child and adolescent mental health services have been far less effective than they ought to have been. I watched the Sky film that the hon. Lady referred to, and I have to say that some of the practices that were referred to in it are utterly unacceptable.

I have been very clear with the CQC that institutions that apply restraint to the extent that the hon. Lady described are totally unacceptable, and it is now being much more aggressive in implementing inspections. We will hold organisations to account. In that respect, the Bill in the name of the hon. Member for Croydon North (Mr Reed) will be a great help. We are in the process of agreeing guidance to deliver that. It will require a real cultural change, but I often say that sunlight is the best disinfectant. The best led institutions are open about when they have to use restraint and fully document it; the worst do not report it at all, and that really has to change. That is something that the CQC challenges now when it visits organisations. I want the number not only out-of-area placements, but of in-patient placements more generally, to come down. That will be a mark of success and a sign that we really are investing in improved community services for our children and young people.

The hon. Lady also referred to the appalling extent to which the young lady in the film had come across people who had engaged in suicide and self-harm. I am pleased that we now have the Zero Suicide Alliance, which is led by the fabulous Joe Rafferty, the chief executive of Mersey Care. Our ambition is to have zero suicides as a consequence of any NHS-funded care. That was launched at the end of last year, and we need to use it as a tool to drive improvements in this area.

As the hon. Lady said, we have the mental health investment standards, whereby we expect local trusts and CCGs to spend more of their budgets on mental health. She suggested that funding should be ring-fenced. I have always felt that ring-fences can be seen as ceilings. However, we are committed, through the long-term plan, to ensuring that all local commissioners abide by those standards, which are a ring-fence in all but name. We are closer than we have been on that issue.

I again remind hon. Members about the troubled families programme, which has been dealing with 400,000 families. It will be revisited next year, and we would welcome any representations from hon. Members about how we can learn from it and improve how we help families with complex needs. Obviously, we need to develop better outcomes for all family members.

Coming back to Marriage Week, we know that good quality relationships are critical for all of us, as they add to our overall happiness. As my hon. Friend the Member for South West Bedfordshire said, some people do not necessarily want their relationship to be recognised as a marriage. None the less, we all benefit from stable, loving and supportive relationships. With my suicide prevention hat on, I will say that relationship breakdown is the biggest driver of suicide. That is another reason why we should always enable people to find help when they need it.

As far as the impact on children and their life chances is concerned, we know that by the age of five, almost half of children in low-income households have seen their families break apart, compared with only 16% of children in higher-income households. As my hon. Friend said, we must address that social injustice because when relationships break down, there is a risk of poor outcomes in the long run.

I see health visitors as very important partners—I always refer to them as my army. They are on the frontline, and their contact with people is less formalised. They are the one group of people who can engage with the entirety of the family. They look not just at the baby and mum, but at dad and the siblings, too. We need to take advantage of those interventions to do better for families in general.

We are spending £39 million on the reducing parental conflict programme, which is designed to reduce conflict between parents who are still together, and work with them to strengthen their relationship, exactly as my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton wants, to help them to stay together if that is what they want. We should also recognise that separation can sometimes be the best option, particularly if there are other factors involved that can cause distress for the children. Even in the event of a separation, continued co-operation and communication between parents and their children will give advantage to the child.

Although the Government will continue to support and champion marriage, we will not discriminate against other types of families who require our support. We will ensure that parents can access help when they need it, whether they are already married and need help to sustain their partnership, are not married and wish to improve the health of their relationship, or have chosen to separate.

I turn to what we are delivering through the NHS long-term plan. The improvement in perinatal mental health services will help us to engage people when they are at risk, assess people’s circumstances, give peer support and perhaps just make a decisive intervention at a time of real stress for families, where either the mother or the father becomes ill.

The theme of this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week is not marriage but body image. The two are not entirely unconnected, because how we think and feel about our bodies obviously affects how we engage with other people. Just as we need to get real and think about working harder, not everything will be ideal. We are not all going to have a marriage that is like a fairy tale 100% of the time, and we are not all going to look like Claudia Schiffer. That is okay—that is normal—and we just need to be aware of that.

It is worrying that, according to the Mental Health Foundation, 39% of children feel shame in relation to body image. We ought to think about the causes of that stark statistic. People are bombarded with images via social media, and so on, so we need to encourage parents to spend time with their children and make sure that children know what they can realistically expect. They cannot expect to look like the doctored images that they are being shown.

That comes back to the issue of quality time. Smartphones have been absolutely revolutionary for our society. Is it not fantastic that we can find information about anything we want and contact people at any time? However, face-to-face engagement, especially between parents and their kids, is really important. I pay tribute to Frankie & Benny’s, the restaurant chain, which has said that to encourage parents to speak to their children while they are having a meal, it will give them a discount if they hand their phone over.

We are so easily distracted by time spent on a phone. The first thing I do in the morning when I wake up, and the last thing I do at night, is to look at my phone. It is not very healthy, to be honest. We need to encourage our children to have a healthy relationship with their smartphones, and the same is true for ourselves. There is no substitute for some good parent-child conversation, and that does not need to take place via WhatsApp or text.

Broader mental health support is available to people who suffer from mental health problems. IAPT provides couples therapy for depression, which is available through the NHS. That directly helps relationships.

This debate has been interesting and thought provoking, and it has highlighted many issues that, although we may agree about them, we perhaps need to be more proactive about properly addressing. They are not the easiest things to deal with, because they are about human failings, but it is good to hear that so many colleagues are bothered about them and actively think about them.

Mental health problems can affect anyone, any day of the year. Those problems have a bearing not only on the wellbeing of the individual, but on marriages, relationships and children. We must continue to work together, across Government and with our partners, to address some of those issues. As a society, we all need to be more sensitive about the stresses of particular times, such as when people experience job loss, debt or relationship breakdown, to ensure that we give people appropriate support.

I am sure we can all agree that Marriage Week and Mental Health Awareness Week provide us with excellent opportunities to bring those subjects together. I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Congleton for bringing those subjects forward for debate.