Children’s Mental Health

Nadia Whittome Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

When I was in school under the then Conservative-led coalition Government, I remember friends and classmates whose mental health was in crisis. They struggled to be seen, and they waited months, even years. Since then, the situation has only got worse.

I am regularly contacted by parents who are caught in the snare of long wait times for underfunded and non-specialist services when trying to access mental health support for their children. In Nottinghamshire, 78% of children referred to child and adolescent mental health services wait longer than four weeks to be seen. Between April and October 2021, just six months, more than 409,000 children were referred to CAMHS for self-harm and suicidal thoughts. I challenge anyone here to tell me that that does not constitute a crisis and that it should not be dealt with as such.

This motion calls on the Government to ensure that there is mental health treatment within a month for those who need it; specialist professional mental health support in schools; and the establishment of open-access mental health hubs in every community. These are moderate demands when we consider what is at stake. There has been a 77% rise in the number of children needing treatment for severe mental health issues since 2019. In my constituency, referrals for treatment for eating disorders—as we have heard, these are the psychiatric conditions with the worst mortality and morbidity outcomes—outstripped predicted levels last year.

Last Friday, I visited children and young people at Hopewood, an in-patient unit in Nottingham East. Many of them were far away from home and far away from their family and friends, and one remarked to me that they felt forgotten about and that no one cared. They were all concerned about mental health funding. Of course it is important for us to talk about awareness, but the sad truth is that people are already aware because they are living it. What they need is material change, and that cannot be provided by volunteers operating on a shoestring. There is no way around it. The only option is for the Government to invest significant amounts of money in proper mental health support and in children’s mental health services.

We must also tackle the root causes of poor mental health in children. The Mental Health Foundation highlights that living in poverty is a risk factor, and the Children’s Society has said:

“Reductions in family income, including benefit cuts, are likely to have wide-ranging negative effects on children’s mental health.”

This is not just a crisis of children’s mental health but a crisis of inequality, too. That inequality is exacerbated by the policies of this Government, who now have a duty to fix it.