Mental Health Education in Schools

Debate between Chris Ruane and Lucy Allan

Monday 6th November 2017 Westminster Hall

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

I apologise, Mr Wilson, for dipping out for an hour. I had to meet Carwyn Jones, First Minister of Wales, at a Welsh group meeting, but I was here for the first 30 minutes and I did intervene on many occasions on my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne North (Catherine McKinnell).

The World Health Organisation says that by 2030 the biggest health burden on the whole of the planet will not be heart disease or cancer; it will be depression. The term “burden” is not a pejorative but a descriptive term for the burden on the individual, their family, society and the economy. This tsunami of mental ill health is coming our way, and I believe that we are ill-prepared for it—ill-prepared for how we treat our adults and especially our children and young people.

In the 19th century, Frederick Douglass said:

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men”—

he definitely should have said, “and women.” That is the situation today. If we can build strong children and give them that resilience, it benefits the individual child and their family, and the knock-on effects of building in that resilience from an early age will benefit our economy and health service down the decades.

I am speaking today about mindfulness. I am co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on mindfulness— I draw hon. Members’ attention to my declaration of interest. I gave the statistic in an intervention earlier that 32.3% of 15 to 25-year-olds experience one or more psychiatric conditions. That is while they are studying for their GCSEs, A-levels, degrees or post-graduate degrees. They are studying and living sub-optimally, and their suffering is magnified because we have not put the strategies in place to help those young people to cope with the modern stresses of society. Our Ministers and health service say that oral hygiene is very important, and we must brush our teeth three times a day; that nutritional health is very important, and we must have our five fruit and veg a day; and that physical activity is very important to keep our bodies healthy. But how much time is allocated to looking after our own minds, our own brains and how we actually view the world?

There are many stresses out there affecting young people. There are the stresses of advertising. Young people have Maccy D’s telling them to “Go large,” and the fashion industry saying “No, no—size zero.” The average child will see 120,000 adverts a year and the messages are well researched and well honed, especially in a digital age, when every time a young person goes on a computer an algorithm calculates what is going on inside their head and sends micro-messages to them. The point of adverting is to make people unhappy with what they have, so that they will purchase something else.

The impact of social media has already been mentioned by many speakers. When I went to school in the 1960s, if I had a fall-out, it was with five or six people. Now it could be 5,000 or 6,000 people. Being tested at school— at the ages of five, seven, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 21—produces massive stresses on young people. We are not equipping them with the capability to deal with those stresses; in fact we are adding to those stresses. There are many other factors that are bringing stress to our children and young people today.

We as politicians should be doing something about that, and I am pleased that this is an area we can agree on. I pay tribute to the former Prime Minister David Cameron for measuring wellbeing and saying—he was quoting Robert Kennedy—that GDP and wealth are not enough; we must look at the wider benefits to society and what makes us click as a society and as individuals within that society. I pay tribute to the Prime Minister for declaring in January that mental health, and children’s mental health, will be right at the top of her priorities. Our own shadow Chancellor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), quoted Robert Kennedy at the Labour conference in saying that the wellbeing of society is important. This is an area where we can, and should, come together.

I want to stress the impact that I believe mindfulness can have. Mindfulness has been freely available on the national health service since 2004. Some people might think that it is a bit woolly, but the copper-bottomed science has been proven to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence by Professor Mark Williams, John Teasdale and Zindel Segal from Canada. Mindfulness has been available, but the take-up is minimal. The science has been proven for this intervention, which puts the individual in control and is cheaper in the long term than antidepressants or talking therapies, yet the take-up has been minimal. Again, I pay tribute to the Government, because they have promised to train an extra 200 or 300 mindfulness-based teachers over the next two years, and that is progress. We have been teaching mindfulness to MPs, peers, their staff and civil servants in Westminster.

[Lucy Allan]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very interesting point about the benefits of mindfulness. I have had the great pleasure of participating in the MPs’ mindfulness training, and have to say that it is quite a challenge to get MPs to turn off their phones and concentrate. Does he agree that we need to encourage more people to understand the benefits of mindfulness and to participate in it?

[Chris Ruane]

Absolutely. Ghandi said, “Be the change you want to see.” We are change-makers in this room, and we need to make our personal, political and parliamentary decisions from a position of personal equanimity and balance. If we do that, we will be doing tribute to ourselves and our society. Some 150 MPs and Lords have had the training, and we instituted a parliamentary inquiry on mindfulness in health, education, criminal justice and the workplace. We have put forward recommendations.