Mental Health First Aid in the Workplace

Johnny Mercer Excerpts

Thursday 17th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Johnny Mercer (Plymouth, Moor View) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger). She is right that it is wonderful to be in this place today with the noise dialled down, so that we can work on and think carefully about one of the most important issues in this country. Mental health is the No. 1 challenge for millions of people in this country every day. If we can meet that challenge in some way by working in the collaborative way that she talked about, that is wonderful. I am really pleased that she has secured this debate and that the Minister is here to listen to it. I also pay tribute to the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb). The three of us have worked together on a number of issues. Like in any team, there are those who lead from the front and do all the heavy lifting and hard work, and that is definitely not me. I want to say a massive thanks to them for their efforts in getting us here today.

When I came into this place in 2015, I talked about how I wanted to end in this Parliament the stigma around mental health. I have found since then that there is still this—it is hard to understand—air around suicide that people do not want to talk about or address, but it remains the biggest killer of men under 44 in this country. Unless we talk about it, we will not come up with ways that interdict and meet the challenge.

[Liz Twist (Blaydon) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree on securing the debate. Does he agree that we need not only to encourage people to talk through industry schemes such as Mates in Mind; we also need to listen? That is why the move towards mental health first aid workers is so important.

[Johnny Mercer]

The hon. Lady is right. There is no point in getting people to come forward and talk about mental health, which can be very difficult, if we do not have the services or access to them to help them, after they have made themselves vulnerable in that way. That is why I am so keen to keep our foot to the gas and ensure that we start delivering on this. We have made progress—that is undeniable—but clearly there is a long way to go, and I will come on to that.

I want to address the point about legislation. As someone who does a lot of work in the armed forces community and on the armed forces covenant, I know that people will say, “Why legislate?” I have learnt in this place that we can have a number of good ideas and initiatives that we can encourage people to do but, ultimately, this is too big a challenge to be left to personalities involved in companies at different times. Sometimes we have to legislate for it. This is not a problem for the companies that already do this, but sometimes the most vulnerable people in our communities deserve the Government legislating and letting them know that we are on side.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I am sorry that I was not here for the beginning of the speech by the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger). I was having my own health and wellbeing check with our excellent service here. The practice nurse was particularly keen to know about my stress levels, given the experience we have all had in the last week, but I am good for another few years.

My hon. Friend may know that I am the co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on mindfulness, which is a simple way of looking after employees’ mental health. Before Christmas, we held a seminar here involving military figures. He knows, from his experience, the high level of mental health issues among that group. I am glad to say that the Army is now seriously looking at how this measure can be introduced, and why wouldn’t it? This is a win-win situation: if an employer looks after its employees and its workforce, they tend to do a better job, and they look after the company or Army unit better as well.

[Johnny Mercer]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. He is right; the military has come a long way. It gets a hard time, but the Army in particular has come a long way on the importance of mindfulness and how much easier it is to keep a healthy mind than get better from a mental illness. I thank him for all the work he does on that. We all come to this place for different reasons, but there is no doubt that the mental health challenge of a decade and a half of combat operations has ripped apart the circle of friends that I grew up with, so I have a real passion for getting this right.

As the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree says, we need to look at this in a slightly different way in this country. We are very good in this place at talking from the Front Bench about what we are putting into services in terms of money and priority, and that is extremely important, but we need to turn the telescope around and ask what it actually feels like to be in the community waiting for access to child and adolescent mental health services or mental health treatment. That is the true metric of what we do in this place. I strongly encourage the Government to look at that approach.

Why am I so interested in this? As everybody now knows, I have had OCD for a long time. Obviously, I like to pretend that it is some sort of distant memory, but my close friends and family know that it is not. It is much better, but there is no doubt that, if there had been mental health first aid when I was a boy, growing up and going into the military, my life would have been completely changed. We cannot underestimate how important it is to intervene early, when someone is so much more likely to get better. I will never forget the Saturday afternoon when I ended up in the Maudsley, thinking, “How did I end up here? How did this all start?” If policies like this had been talked about 20 years ago, millions of lives would have been very different.

I talk about this because it sends a powerful message: you can get better. People think that they are managing their mental health for the rest of their life, they reach their zenith and that is it. I cannot over-emphasise how wrong that is. Clearly managing a mental health challenge is a difficulty, but it can absolutely be done, and the chances of doing that are exponentially increased by early intervention. If we can get into workplaces and say to people, “We take mental health as seriously as physical health,” we will affect millions of lives, which is ultimately what we come to this place every week to do.

I pay tribute again to the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree and the right hon. Member for North Norfolk, who have done a lot of the heavy lifting on this. There are not many people here today, but in some ways, that does not matter. There will be people following this intensely because they have a mental health challenge. They may be 15, 16 or 17-year-old young boys, like I was, who never talk about it and who learn about what is going on through their phone but do not even talk to their parents. When I spoke about my OCD in the Evening Standard, I had loads of phone calls the next day, but the best one was from a 16-year-old boy who said he had never spoken to his parents or anyone about it.

There will be a lot of people watching this debate who were devastated when it was cancelled before Christmas. They are the people we are here for, and that is why people like me speak out. It is not easy to speak about individual issues in this House, but I want to say to boys and girls who are watching this now and may be struggling: don’t think for a minute that because there are not lots of people here, and there is not the raucous shouting that we have seen in the last few days, this is in any way less important to many of us in this place. Just because we are quieter, it does not mean that we do not hear you.

There is a mental health revolution going on in this country—we have seen it start and people are talking about it. The Government have committed to parity of esteem. We are flicking over from meeting one in four mental health needs at the moment to one in three. Clearly there is a big unmet need and we have further to go, but it is an unstoppable direction of travel, and today is another point on that march.

I sincerely hope that the Government can take forward these recommendations. I slightly disagree with the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree only on one point: parity of esteem does mean something. However, she is right: it does not if people in our communities do not feel it. It is not good enough here to say, “Parity of esteem is a wonderful thing. Haven’t we done well? We’ve put it into Government legislation.” It is meaningless unless the people who use the services actually feel like they are treated in the same way and have the same access to treatments as those with physical health problems. I commend the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree and the right hon. Member for North Norfolk for the march we are taking on this, together with the stuff we have done on money and mental health. In this Parliament of immense turbulence, for those who are watching—the quieter ones, whom I have spoken about—this march will continue. They have some wonderful advocates in this place and we keep going.