Children’s Mental Health

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dr Allin-Khan]

My hon. Friend is right to remind us that adverse childhood experiences and inequalities, including health inequalities, lead to worse mental health outcomes in later life and stop children from achieving their full potential.

Imagine being a mum or dad whose child is self-harming or presenting with symptoms of depression, anxiety or phobia, and being without specialist support for extended periods. We all agree that the pressure that that puts on families and parents is just so crippling. The number of children who needed specialist treatment for severe mental health crises between April 2021 and October 2021 was 77% higher than in the same period in 2019.

This is the UK in 2022. The bar to being seen by a specialist is high, the delays are long and three quarters of children were not seen within four weeks of referral. That time is one of anguish for them and their family. Does the Minister believe that making 369,000 children wait for vital mental health support is acceptable?

According to the latest report by the Children’s Commissioner, waiting times depend on where people live—so much for levelling up—and when they are eventually seen, services may be hundreds of miles away. It is making the situation so much worse. Ask any parent or any young person; they will tell us that the uncertainty and paucity of mental health services damages mental health, exacerbates mental health conditions, allows symptoms to persist and makes conditions harder to treat down the line. Ultimately, it also costs more.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

The mental health disorders with the highest mortality rate are eating disorders. What the hon. Member says is particularly true for eating disorders: the longer somebody waits for treatment, the longer the disorder persists, which makes it worse. We really need to look at prevention and early intervention in all our services. Does the hon. Member agree that instead of saving money at the wrong end, it makes absolute sense to put money into early intervention and, better still, prevention?

[Dr Allin-Khan]

I entirely agree. It has been a pleasure to work alongside the hon. Member in looking at eating disorder issues over the past couple of years; she is a powerful advocate. She reiterates my point that prevention is better than cure. We know that in the pandemic, eating disorders have increased. Young people who feel the loss of their sense of control through fear can, in trying to understand what is going on in their lives, develop habits that are unfortunately very difficult to break. We know that the earlier someone can intervene when there are such issues, the better the outcomes will be.

Sometimes the damage, especially the damage done by waiting, is permanent. Imagine if we treated childhood cancer like we do children’s mental illness: waiting for symptoms to get worse before seeing a specialist, waiting for months or even years for treatment and leaving patients and parents to rely on charity. There would be an outcry, yet that is what the Government are doing with children’s mental health. When the Minister responds, I invite them to tell the House what new measures the Government are taking, what new money is being allocated to CAMHS, and where it is going. How many mental health staff will be recruited? How will they deal specifically with the impact of the pandemic on mental health? How will they tackle the deep-rooted mental health inequalities on the lines of place, race, class and income?

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[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

I am speaking today, as I have done before, as the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on eating disorders. Eating disorders are the mental health disorders with the highest mortality rate. My hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) talked today with a breaking voice about cases in her constituency and the hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (Jess Phillips) talked about the terrible things happening to our constituents that we see and hear about; I worry about the lives of a number of young people I know and about their families, who are worried sick about losing them. That is what we are talking about today.

Eating disorders are complex and potentially life-threatening, and the number of cases has increased fourfold in the last two years. They have no single cause and often start at school age. Recovery from an eating disorder takes on average three times as long as having the disorder itself. The fact that eating disorders all too often go undiagnosed—we have heard again and again about how long waiting times are—and that people are waiting so long to get treatment adds to the problem.

Eating Disorders Awareness Week is fast approaching. This year’s focus will be on training doctors to recognise these disorders. A 2019 report from the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman identified a “serious lack of training” about eating disorders, which received just a few hours of attention on medical courses. That means that children, who often cannot adequately express their needs or condition, have been left on their own with these complex and debilitating conditions. Three years on, very little has changed.

Moving forward, we must recognise the importance of prevention and early intervention, which dramatically improve the chances of recovery. School counselling is an ideal form of early intervention. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have statutory school counselling services. England does not. Meanwhile, community services and the voluntary sector face a backlog of people desperate for urgent help. Our voluntary sector, such as the regional eating disorders charities network, has taken on the lion’s share of school counselling and shouldered the burden of addressing the mental health of our children. We must recognise the invaluable work that they are doing and make sure that they get more funding. Some £11 million has been allocated to improve eating disorder services, but only £1.1 million has been spent on the frontline. I have raised that worrying statistic with the Minister before, and I urge her to listen. We must make sure that every penny that the Government make available actually gets to the frontline.