Perinatal Mental Illness

Debate between Barbara Keeley and Luciana Berger

Thursday 19th July 2018 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Rosindell. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South (Dr Williams) and the hon. Member for South West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) on securing this important debate and on how they opened it. We have heard contributions from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Rosie Duffield), the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) and the Scottish National party spokesperson, the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss). We also heard interventions from the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Kevin Hollinrake), my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) and, just a moment ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger).

Pregnancy, birth and becoming a parent can be a special and rewarding time for many people. As we have heard, it is a time to celebrate new life and the start of the exciting journey into parenthood. However, for others, the stress and upheaval of pregnancy and becoming a parent can trigger existing mental health problems or spark new ones. Perinatal mental health issues can include severe mental health disorders that require severe immediate hospital treatment, such as postpartum psychosis. It may affect only two cases in 1,000, but it is a very serious condition and can put new mothers at risk of harming themselves and their baby. The issues can also include most common mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks. My hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South spoke very well about the impact of those mental health conditions on the child’s development.

Given the expectation that pregnancy and becoming a parent should be a joyful time, women who experience those conditions can feel even more stressed and unhappy, and often that they are somehow to blame for their condition. A study by the Boots Family Trust in 2013 described some of those experiences. One mother said:

“I avoided friends at all costs as I lost the ability to communicate and became very isolated”.

Another said:

“I’m currently into my second pregnancy and think I am suffering from depression…I feel scared and feel like I have trouble bonding with this pregnancy…I don’t know what is wrong with me.”

We know that one in five women will experience mental health problems during pregnancy. Given the high prevalence of mental health issues in new and expectant mothers, the woman I just quoted should not have had to feel like something was wrong with her. We have heard many excellent examples in the same vein in this debate. One way to prevent women from feeling isolated or somehow to blame is by identifying those mental health issues and ensuring the proper support is put in place. Unfortunately, as hon. Members said, too often that does not happen.

Hon. Members rightly highlighted that identification is a major barrier to accessing support for mental health issues. I join them in congratulating the National Childbirth Trust on its #HiddenHalf campaign. The research underpinning that campaign shows that nearly half of all the mental health problems that new mothers experience are not picked up by health professionals.

As we have heard, early intervention is key. The sooner issues are identified, the quicker people can access appropriate support, and that surely drives better outcomes. It is simply not good enough that only half of perinatal mental health issues are picked up. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South detailed, GPs should offer a post-natal check about six weeks after the baby’s birth. We have heard that a properly delivered check-up can have a transformative effect on new mothers who are experiencing mental health problems. Research by the National Childbirth Trust found that women directly questioned by a GP about their mental health were almost seven times more likely to disclose a mental health problem. If mental health problems are left untreated, they can escalate into much more severe mental illness.

The National Childbirth Trust also found that 95% of women who had experienced a mental health problem felt it affected their ability to cope or look after their children or family relationships. As we have heard, the six-week post-natal baby check is mandatory, but the maternal check was left out of the GP contract. As a result, the maternal check is often not done at all or becomes a rushed conversation at the end of the baby check. In one third of cases, the maternal check was estimated to last three minutes or less.

The National Childbirth Trust recommends that the Government fund the six-week maternal post-natal check so that GPs have the time to give every new mother a full appointment for the maternal check. As we have heard, the National Childbirth Trust also recommends an improvement in the guidelines for best practice around maternal mental health, including a separate appointment for that maternal six-week check, and they recommend better methods of encouraging disclosure of maternal mental health problems.

I have looked at the NHS England guidance, which states:

“There are no set guidelines for what a postnatal check for mothers should involve.”

It also states:

“The following is usually offered, though this may vary according to where you live...You will be asked how you are feeling as part of a general discussion about your mental health and wellbeing.”

We can and must do better than that.

I have already mentioned the pressure on women to feel happy after the birth of a child and how mental health issues can lead to their feeling that there is something wrong with them. It can often lead to women putting on a brave face. One woman, responding to the Boots Family Trust survey, said:

“I was terrified to admit to any health professional as I was scared they would take my son away.”

That is exactly the point made by the hon. Member for Glasgow Central and it demonstrates the challenges that GPs face in identifying mental health issues. Merely asking how a new mother is feeling is no substitute for a properly trained staff member identifying mental health issues and knowing how to encourage disclosure.

The National Childbirth Trust recommends that NHS bodies should support and invest in initiatives to facilitate and further develop GP education on maternal mental health. Earlier, my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham touched on the fact that investment in perinatal mental health would result in savings. It is worth thinking about how much that might be.

The statement from the Royal College of General Practitioners about perinatal mental health said that post-natal depression, anxiety and psychosis carry an estimated total long-term cost to society of about £8.1 billion for each one-year cohort of births in the UK, and 72% of the cost relates to adverse impacts on the child. That reinforces the very important points that my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton South made earlier. More than a fifth of those total costs—£1.7 billion—are borne by the public sector: mainly NHS and social care. I hope that that all helps to give the Minister ammunition. Sadly, the average cost to society of one case of perinatal depression is estimated to be £74,000: £23,000 relates to the mother and £51,000 to the impact on the child. There is every reason to try to make the case being made in the debate today.

We must make sure that, where a diagnosis has been made, appropriate treatment and support is made available. According to the Maternal Mental Health Alliance, a quarter of pregnant women and new mothers cannot access specialist perinatal mental health services that meet the full National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines. Only 7% of the women who reported experiencing a maternal mental health condition were referred to specialist care. It took more than four weeks for the 38% of the women who were referred to be seen. Shockingly—we have heard several examples—some women waited up to a year for treatment. My hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury talked about such an example. In fact, it was recently revealed that there were only 131 specialist perinatal beds in the whole of the UK, with none in Northern Ireland or Wales.

We know that pressure on mental health trusts comes from money earmarked for mental health services being used to pay for other areas of the NHS. The Labour party would ring-fence mental health spending so that funding for mental health services is not siphoned off to pay for other priorities. In this debate we have heard much detail of the #HiddenHalf campaign. The Opposition support that important campaign and we would look at implementing it in government. We call on the Government now to make resources available so that every mother is given the perinatal support that she deserves. It is important that we also include that commitment to ring-fence mental health spending so that the funding that is meant to be for mental health services does not go to other priorities in the NHS.

The Government have made some commitments on perinatal mental health, and I am keen to hear from the Minister, if we have time, what progress has been made. The five-year forward view for mental health set a target to ensure that by 2021 at least 30,000 more women each year would be able to access specialist mental health care during the perinatal period. Given that we are now halfway through that phase of the five-year forward view for mental health, can the Minister tell the House what progress has been made towards that target and whether NHS England is on track to meet it?

In autumn 2017, at the maternal mental health ministerial roundtable, a number of commitments were made to improve perinatal mental health services. They included a commitment that the Department of Health would work with health system partners and other Government Departments to deliver improvements in perinatal mental health services, and a commitment that NHS England would expand specialist mental health services by 2021 to meet the needs of women in all areas. We have heard, as we hear in so many debates on health and social care, about very unfortunate postcode lotteries, so how is NHS England doing in expanding those specialist services to meet the needs of all women?

[Luciana Berger]

My hon. Friend is making a strong case, as have other colleagues, about the inconsistency of the availability of perinatal mental health services. Although there has been some investment, there are still many areas where there is no sufficient, adequate or indeed any immediate access, and mothers still have to travel too far across the country to access a bed if they need one in a mother and baby unit. Does she share the concern expressed by the British Medical Association that there is a 20% difference in referral rates in some areas, which illustrates the inconsistency of care? When the issue is so critical not only for the mother but for the child in its lifetime, that is something that the Government should urgently address.

[Barbara Keeley]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend. It is very important that the Minister tells us now or after the debate what is happening to expand the services so that we do not have what are almost deserts, where women have to travel either to get a bed or to get the service that they need.

Finally, there was a commitment in autumn 2017 that NHS Health Education England would support the roll-out of GP perinatal mental health champions across England. I am sure it would help if there was in every area a perinatal mental health champion speaking up for their own area. Will the Minister tell the House what progress has been made on these important commitments?

I want to conclude on a wider point about women’s mental health. Women are more likely to suffer from mental ill health than men, and yet too often women’s specific mental health needs remain a blind spot. Research by Agenda, the women’s mental health charity, has shown that mental health trusts are too often failing to consider women’s specific needs. Only one of the 35 trusts that responded to a freedom of information request by Agenda had a strategy on gender-specific mental health services.

Fourteen years ago, the Labour Government launched a comprehensive women’s mental health strategy to address the specific mental health needs of women. Sadly, that strategy was ditched by the coalition Government, and women’s mental health has since slipped down the policy agenda. The Mental Health Foundation has described it as being “almost invisible” in Government policy.

We have had an excellent debate today in which many useful examples have been given and many good points made. There is a strong feeling that we want to help the Minister do something about this issue. Will she in future match Labour’s commitment to have a national women’s health strategy that would work to deliver the targeted support that women and girls need?

Health and Social Care Committee and Education Committee

Debate between Barbara Keeley and Luciana Berger

Thursday 10th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Luciana Berger]

I thank the hon. Lady for her important contribution, which emphasised the need to focus on the workforce that the Government are expecting to deliver their Green Paper plans. We know that Health Education England is due to publish in July this year its workforce strategy, and I sincerely hope that it has listened to the points we heard in the Committee and those that she just made about the massive gap that exists in terms of psychologists and child psychiatrists in the community. That is a critical issue.

On the hon. Lady’s point about comorbidities, there is a gaping hole in the Government’s Green Paper on the children who are the most vulnerable and need the most support. There are references to children from the most vulnerable backgrounds, but nothing in practice about how that might be addressed. I hope that, in the Government’s response, they will reflect on our recommendations and seek to bring forward proposals that target children who most need support.

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

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the way she has introduced the report and the Select Committees on producing it. She will know that YoungMinds and NHS Providers have expressed concerns about the fact that increasingly high eligibility thresholds for child and adolescent mental health services mean that the mental ill health of children and young people escalates to crisis point before a referral. That was reinforced by the Care Quality Commission’s thematic review, which recently reported that GPs were telling children to pretend to be more ill than they were, to ensure they got treatment. There is much for the Government to respond to in the report, but will she join me in calling on them to investigate that urgently?

[Luciana Berger]

I thank my hon. Friend for her important contribution. On the thresholds over which children have to jump to access services in the first place, I get emails almost every week from young people or their parents or carers, sharing their experiences of how long it has taken them to get access to services, if they have even been able to get through the door at all. Young people are having to attempt to take their lives before they see a clinical professional. That is not acceptable, and the Government need to address it now if they are going to successfully implement their plans.

One of our recommendations was that within the mental health investment standard introduced by the Government to ensure that clinical commissioning groups apportion a certain amount of funds to mental health, there should be a specific ring fence for children and young people’s mental health. We know from the investigations and research that has been done that at the moment, too many clinical commissioning groups are diverting money away from young people’s mental health to other parts of the NHS. It is under enormous strain, but that money needs to be protected.