Women’s Mental Health

Jackie Doyle-Price Excerpts

Thursday 3rd October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Jackie Doyle-Price (Thurrock) (Con)]

It is, as usual, a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), who is always a fixture in these mental health debates, as, indeed, is the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), and I congratulate her on securing this debate.

I thank the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) for her very honest contribution. It is about time we were honest about the fact that childbirth is hard and that what happens after we have given birth is hard. We could be forgiven for buying into the myth that it is all hearts and flowers, but the reality is very different indeed for many women and their families. It is absolutely fantastic that she made that very honest contribution today. Those of us in this place need to be frank about our own experiences to make the system better.

It is a glib thing to say that it is a man’s world, but, frankly, it is. On so many levels, the health service, in terms of both physical and mental health, does not work well for women. I was therefore pleased to have chaired the women’s mental health taskforce with Katharine Sacks-Jones from Agenda, and I thank her today for her contribution. It is important that we look at women’s mental health, as distinct from that of men. In the same way, we ought to look at mental health through the prism of other things that end up being discriminatory. For example, there is the whole gamut of neurodiverse conditions, autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. There are more mental health issues in people who have those conditions, and, frankly, we are not doing enough for them. That also plays out in further discrimination against women, because they are often diagnosed much later with autism and ADHD, and they are then not equipped with the tools to manage their conditions.

It was absolutely fantastic to get buy-in from people with real experience on the women’s mental health taskforce. My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) talked about perinatal, and that was of course a big part of it. It is interesting that we are debating this issue today, just a day after that amazing debate on the Domestic Abuse Bill, because abuse is often a common factor underlying the prevalence of mental ill health in women.

We set up the women’s mental health taskforce because we were seeing an increased prevalence of mental ill health among women between the ages of 16 and 24. There is no doubt in my mind that an underlying cause is abuse, particularly the rise of sexual abuse and violence.

The women’s mental health taskforce concluded that we needed more by way of community services to support women, and one important part of that was improving the support for victims of sexual violence. I completely agree with the right hon. Member for North Durham about the contribution that voluntary services can make in this space. When I was the Minister, one of the messages I always gave to commissioners was not to medicalise everything. Voluntary services, particularly in mental ill health, can give so much additional support to people. That wraparound support can be as important to someone’s recovery or ability to manage their condition as any medical intervention. In welcoming my hon. Friend the Minister to her post, I ask her to continue giving that message to commissioners, not least because, as well as delivering the services well, voluntary services often provide much better value for money. So let us continue to do that.

I was pleased that earlier this year the NHS published its strategy to deal with sexual violence and to provide sexual violence support services. Within it was a commitment to a lifelong package of care for survivors of sexual abuse. The voluntary sector—the hon. Member for Bath mentioned rape crisis centres—has a huge role to play in making sure we continue to support victims of sexual abuse.

Women are often a secondary consideration in the way we deal with many problems, and by definition that becomes discriminatory. We have had a lot of debates in recent months about gangs and the problem of young men carrying knives and stabbing each other and the fact that there are far too many deaths, but another aspect of that gang culture that is not talked about enough is the grooming of girls. It is almost like Rotherham never happened. We must make sure that when we look at gang culture, we do not just talk about young men stabbing each other or the drug trade that goes with it; we must also tackle the grooming of young women, otherwise the incidence of mental ill health among women aged 16 to 24 will only continue to rise.

One thing not yet mentioned in this debate is the review of the Mental Health Act 1983. We must make sure that when we look after women with severe mental ill health we are not doing harm. We need to deal with some of the practices that still exist in our treatment of people with mental ill health. We used to think of people with mental ill health as an inconvenience to be managed. Thankfully, we are becoming much more enlightened, but there is still poor practice that needs to be weeded out. I repeat that abuse is often the underlying trigger that exacerbates a woman’s mental ill health, and when we treat women, we should not compound that harm by handing over the control of someone who has been sectioned to their abusive partner. Under the Act, however, when someone is sanctioned, the next of kin is effectively given control over them, which only compounds the harm. I have heard some incredibly distressing testimony from people who have been through exactly that. As that work continues, we must empower patients, including women who are victims of domestic abuse.

We have heard reference to eating disorders. We have actually made considerable progress in improving eating disorder services, but we need to do much more for adults. The health service needs to empower women, not just tell them to run along. Many Members will be aware of the campaign by Hope Virgo, the Dump the Scales campaign, but the really telling thing about Hope’s testimony is this: she has been through anorexia, she understands her condition, and she can see when she needs help, but when she goes to her GP, she is weighed and told she does not have a problem. That shows a fundamental misunderstanding about how eating disorders play out and how they should be managed. Members have discussed the need to make sure GPs behave better. One reason GPs do not behave as well as they should when dealing with mental health is that they are not adequately trained. I encourage the Minister to have that conversation with the royal colleges to make sure mental health training is a mandatory part of doctors’ training. The earlier we identify someone who needs help, the more effective that support can be.

I want to finish by picking up on an issue raised by several colleagues, including my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess): that of people in prison. We all know that prison should be a place where people go when they have done bad things, but anyone who visits a prison wanders around thinking, “A lot of these people shouldn’t be here at all.” They are people who have fallen out of society and been failed by the state. That is particularly the case for women. The more we can do to get that early intervention the better. We should not be allowing people to fall out of the care of society and then dealing with them only when they become a nuisance. That applies to people who have been through the care system and been victims of abuse.

[Mr Kevan Jones]

Does the hon. Lady agree that one of the problems that pertains particularly to women prisoners is that of short sentences, which do not give enough time for rehabilitation and over time disengage people from services outside and, in a lot of cases, from families and other support networks?

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

The right hon. Gentleman puts it very well. In those instances, we are just doing harm. We should be able to identify when somebody needs help. Just taking them away and putting them in prison without any programme of support only puts them on a conveyor belt to more offending. We need to make sure we are picking people up. There are some fantastic tales of how people do that. I once met a lady who had been convicted of drink driving after she reported herself. She had gone through a period of grief. What good would it have done to make her serve a prison sentence? It would have compounded her grief; she would have been away from her family; and she would have lost her job and probably her home—if she was renting—which would only have put her on a conveyor belt to disaster. We must be much more enlightened and make sure that our prisons are for people who are going to harm society, not people who are harming themselves.

I could say so much more, Madam Deputy Speaker, but time is limited, so I will finish there.