Mental Health Treatment and Support

Kim Leadbeater Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Commons Chamber

[Kim Leadbeater (Batley and Spen) (Lab)]

“We should be frank. We have not done enough to end the stigma of mental health. We have focused a lot on physical health and we haven’t as a country focused enough on mental health.”

Those are not my words, although I agree with them wholeheartedly. They were spoken in 2016 by the then Prime Minister, David Cameron. He went on to say that if we

“intervene much earlier with those suffering from poor mental health…we can stop problems escalating… By breaking the mental health taboo, by working with businesses and charities…I believe we can lead a revolution in mental health treatment in Britain.”

Yes, yes and yes. My question is: why, seven-and-a-half years and four Tory Prime Ministers later, are we still waiting? Mr Cameron has long departed these Benches. This is not the occasion to lament the mess that he left behind, but the experience in my constituency—and, I respectfully suggest, in the constituencies of many, if not all, hon. Members—is that the Government’s approach to mental health remains, all these years later, wholly inadequate.

We have heard a lot of statistics in the debate. The numbers matter, because they show the overwhelming scale of the problem that we are facing. Every one of those numbers is an individual, and around them is a network of family and friends whose lives are impacted day in, day out by the very real challenges of confronting mental illness. I have met many such individuals and families in my constituency. Just last week, I hosted a roundtable at which I heard heartbreaking stories of such daily struggles, many of which involve children and young people.

Amelia is now 16. She was diagnosed with autism at the age of seven. For the past nine years, her mum, Anna, and her family have been trying to get help and support, and they are on their knees with exhaustion. Amelia has attempted to take her own life several times, and has been so let down by the system that she says that she just does not trust it anymore. It feels to her that she only gets any kind of support when there is an absolute crisis. I believe that, if she had got the support that she needed a long time ago, she and her family would be in a much better place today.

Eli is 10. He has been diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome. He has various tics affecting his eyes, face, neck, back, hands and feet. He is a fantastic young man, but he is regularly in pain, which affects his ability to cope with days at school and has a huge effect on his mental health. Until recently, he was told that he just had conjunctivitis. His mum, Natalie, told me that she has struggled to find the psychiatric support Eli needs, and every time she calls CAMHS she is passed from person to person. She has been told that there are no NICE guidelines on Tourette’s and the best they have been offered to date has been worry management.

Those are just two examples, but they reflect a much bigger problem across society and in all our communities. I have meetings regularly with teachers across Batley and Spen, but we spend far more time discussing the mental health needs of their pupils and their families than we do the many other challenges faced in education—another sector that is underfunded and under-resourced. We cannot keep pushing this issue back on schools. Teachers do an amazing job, but we cannot expect them to take on responsibility for what is a widespread societal health issue because of more than a decade of lack of focus and national leadership on mental health.

It is not just teachers. Because we do not have the mental health experts and provision that we need in the places where we need them, it falls to others in the community to pick up the pieces. In Batley and Spen, I am incredibly proud of the many voluntary organisations, sports clubs and charities that do a magnificent job week in and week out under huge pressure. I pay tribute to groups such as Andy’s Man Club, Game Changerz, Blue Tulips, Team Daniel and Luke’s Lads, but the voluntary sector is propping up the NHS and society as a whole. That is not sustainable and it is simply not right. We would not expect teachers, sports coaches, voluntary groups and others to deal with a burst appendix, a broken leg or an ear infection, so why are we asking them to deal with the mental health crisis? They are, of course, part of a wider, holistic solution, but they should not be the only solution. That is not the parity of esteem between mental health and physical health that David Cameron spoke of. While I am hugely optimistic about the excellent plans Labour has to address the mental health crisis, people such as Natalie, Eli, Anna and Amelia cannot wait any longer, which is why today’s debate is so important.