Mental Health

Phillip Lee Excerpts

Wednesday 9th December 2015 Commons Chamber

[Dr Phillip Lee (Bracknell) (Con)]

I congratulate colleagues on their contributions and welcome familiar faces from past mental health debates.

This is obviously a massive subject, and it is impossible to cover it in three minutes. I am struck by the number of different specialties and different problems within mental health that have already been touched on, be it addiction, dementia, depression, stress-related illness, or eating disorders in the young—the list goes on and on. Sadly, all these things are increasing in frequency. Next week and over Christmas, I will be working as a doctor, and I can guarantee that I will be seeing people with mental health problems during that period. We have talked a lot about service provision; in fact, I think that every contribution so far has dealt with that.

We might want to reflect on our society and ask ourselves the difficult questions as to why we are seeing an increase in depression, stress-related illness, eating disorders and the like. I would say that it reflects what is sick in our society. There are the drivers towards excess consumption that we can afford neither financially nor physically. There is the breakdown of the family, with people not taking their parental responsibilities as seriously as they should on every occasion. There is the retreat of the Church, to be replaced by what, exactly? I am not sure that anything has come forward to replace the Church in providing from within communities, and not necessarily from Government, a community hub and support for people in distress. We should all reflect on that. We should spend a few weeks or a few months thinking about it, and ask ourselves how we can pass legislation here, how we can perhaps lead different lives as role models, and how we can encourage people to seek a life that is better in terms of the quality of life and also physical and mental health.

I want to mention something specifically with regard to forensic psychiatry. My constituency is proud to host the pre-eminent high-security hospital, Broadmoor. Broadmoor hospital is widely renowned internationally. It is being redeveloped over the next few years. This redevelopment was based on a Care Quality Commission report commissioned under the previous Labour Government, and the decision was made by the coalition Government. It provides £250 million for 210 to 220 new beds and is designed around new clinical models. Broadmoor is not a prison, but if its recidivism rate was replicated across the prison service, we would all be extremely happy. Its 420 nurses and 12 consultants do remarkably good work. It is challenging work dealing with some very difficult cases—the type of cases we see in our newspapers. I am very proud that that hospital is based in my constituency, and I am particularly proud of a society that places such emphasis on treating people as patients, not as criminals.