Mental Health: Young People

Baroness Massey of Darwen Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2017 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they plan to take in the light of the Association for Young People’s Health briefing There for you which discusses the role of parents in supporting young people with mental health problems.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen (Lab)]

My Lords, I am delighted to have secured this debate on the very important and pressing issue of young people and mental health, and the importance of parental support. The report is called There for You—an apt title, as I shall discuss. I am grateful to the Association for Young People’s Health, of which I am a proud patron, for presenting the results of its recent survey so cogently.

I am very happy to see that the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, is responding to the debate. I am aware of his interest in young people and we have often discussed their well-being in relation to character education and the links to personal, social and health education and life skills education. My noble friend Lord Patel also has a fine track record in supporting the development of initiatives in mental health. Many noble Lords speaking today have a variety of perspectives on this, so I look forward to a lively debate.

I will talk about some of the report’s background and proceed to repeat points made by parents. I will then seek the Minister’s acceptance of these points and his support. I recognise and appreciate that much has been done in recent years in recognition of young people’s mental health needs. I salute Norman Lamb MP for his tenacity and excellent work on this. The Prime Minister, of course, mentioned mental health last week.

I hosted the launch of this report. There, I talked to many parents who have the experience of supporting a son or daughter with mental health needs. They expressed agonies of feeling helpless, guilty, angry and sad at the lack of support. Many had sought private counselling as there was nothing available in the state system. The report estimates that 36% of parents are in this position. We must remember that young people are not just teenagers, but include children of primary school age and younger. These children may show disturbing behaviour—I do not mean just naughty behaviour, which is perfectly normal, but distress, which needs deciding upon and doing something about if it is not to become more serious.

Some of the parents had formed local parent groups. The question occurred to me: what if you cannot afford to get help? What if you do not have, for whatever reason, the initiative to set up a group? It seems that you just get left behind, feeling more and more distressed. I will give two moving quotations from the report. First, a parent said:

“It must be incredibly hard for a young person who’s in crisis themselves to then look at the one person they trust, who is sitting on the floor sobbing … thinking I have no idea what to do, and nobody’s helping me”.


Secondly, a young person said that,

“if they were to empower my mum … then I would feel more empowered too”.

These are real cries for help.

The report is part of a wider parenting project and reflects a survey of parents’ networks co-ordinated by Young Minds, which also does excellent work on the broad aspects of young people and mental health. A thousand parents were involved—not parents who had no voice at all, or those who are perhaps less engaged with their young person’s mental health problems, but it is a starting point for finding out what parents think. A fuller profile of the parents taking part is given in the short report.

The need for such research and action is clear. Half of all adult psychiatric disorders start by the age of 14. Only a quarter of young people referred to specialist services will be seen. Only 0.7% of the total NHS budget is spent on mental health services for the under-18s. Things are simply not changing fast enough, despite all the excellent recommendations and reports. I ask the Minister: how might this be improved? Self-help is good, but it is not sufficient. Parents and young people need a better deal. It is so much better to treat such problems early, rather than wait. Costs, as well as human misery, inevitably increase the longer there is lack of support.

Parents say that there is a problem of waiting times for treatment. They are often left alone to cope. They may have to take time off work, or go part-time or give up work. They struggle to find help or they may feel that they have something to offer but get sidelined. Many parents I talked to said that they needed more guidance on how to offer help to the young person in need. Dealing with a young person in crisis can leave a parent feeling helpless, guilty and under-confident. Parents and families—such problems affect the whole family—are desperate. Parents in the survey made suggestions about how things could be improved.

I will recount some of their ideas. The first is the development of parent support groups. Parents are dealing with the stresses of their children’s lives constantly. Of course, parenting has its joyful aspects, but come a crisis, parents and families often need help rather than having to cope on their own. Support groups are one way of helping. When I was chair of the National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse some years ago—the noble Lord, Lord Patel, will remember that—support groups for users, parents, grandparents and families were prominent in aiding recovery and, frankly, keeping people sane. Some of those groups were supported by local authorities. Support could include practical advice, with a dedicated worker to provide support. Would that not be a way of helping parents with children and parents struggling with crises, especially mental health crises? Support could include practical advice on where to go next in finding a CAMHS worker, for example, or other consistent key workers. Consistency is really important here. Having someone with professional expertise alongside them would be a boon to parents.

Secondly, parent support workers attached to schools were suggested as another means of helping parents. Such a person might, for example, manage the interface between services such as CAMHS, the school and the home. I certainly advocate a role for schools here. I have long been convinced that much stress is created in schools by overtesting and overpressurising. That is what children say. There is still no requirement for schools to develop coherent programmes for delivering ways of coping, such as personal, social and health education, character education, life skills—whatever we call it, children need it.

Thirdly, parents stressed the need for and importance of early intervention—help before the breaking point. A triage-based service for all levels of mental health issues is important, not just when they become crises. Parents also suggested that out-of-hours support such as telephone helplines could be important. They thought that parents could help design services and delivery. Involving those dealing with problems is always a better way of getting things right—my words, not theirs.

In reflecting on the results of this extremely helpful and powerful survey, I do not underestimate factors such as socioeconomic status, poverty and family situations. But any child, from any stratum of society or any family, can develop mental health problems. We must recognise that, and act on developing the valuable role that parents can play as partners in such situations. There may be some costs involved, but nothing extraordinary. In pure cash terms, the savings would be enormous in the long run. In terms of distress, they would be even more enormous.

Will the Minister reassure us that the Government have their eye on this, and will he personally intervene to encourage initiatives to help parents and young people? I know that he knows it makes total sense.