Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what steps his Department is taking to prevent self-harm among teenagers.

We updated the Cross-Government Suicide Prevention Strategy for England earlier this year. This included expanding its scope to address self-harm as an issue in its own right. We are investing £247 million to implement mental health liaison teams in acute hospitals by 2020/21, with 50% meeting the core 24 standard to provide services 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Mental health liaison teams will be well placed to support people who present at emergency departments for self-harm. We are investing £400 million to implement improved crisis resolution and home treatment teams in the community and we are committed to implementing a community-based pathway of care for self-harm by 2019.

The Department funds the Multi-Centre Study of Self-Harm in England which collects and monitors data on people who present at emergency departments across three centres in Derby, Manchester and Oxford to provide analysis of self-harming trends which informs policy development.

We are ensuring that every local area has a suicide prevention plan in place by the end of the year and we will be working with local authorities to support them in quality assuring their plans. We expect local authorities to reflect the national key areas for action in the Cross-Government Suicide Prevention Strategy, including on self-harm, within their plans. This means local multi-agency groups working across all local services, including the voluntary sector, to tailor specific suicide and self-harm interventions to support high risk groups in their communities.

We are looking at the impact of the internet and social media on the mental wellbeing of young people. The Department of Health works with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to improve safety online and especially for young people through the UK Council for Child Internet Safety. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport published a national Internet Safety Strategy Green Paper this year which seeks to address a wide range of potential harms online, including suicidal and self-harm content. We work with a wide range of stakeholders including the Samaritans to explore issues such as the responsible reporting of suicide and self-harm in the media and are working with online and social media providers to improve the way that online users can report harmful content or to signpost people who may search for suicide or self-harm content.

The Cross-Government Suicide Prevention Strategy also highlights that action should be taken to tailor approaches to the specific mental health needs of some groups such as children and young people. Earlier this month we published the joint health and education Children and Young People’s Mental Health Green Paper, ‘Transforming children and young people’s mental health provision: a green paper’, which sets out ambitious proposals for prevention and early intervention and improving access to children and young people’s mental health services. We are also rolling out Mental Health First Aid training to secondary schools by 2019 and expanding this to primary schools to equip teachers to spot the signs of mental health problems earlier and to support their pupils and signpost or refer them to specialist mental health services where appropriate.