Women’s Mental Health — House of Commons, 2019-10-03
Topic: Health
Timothy Paul Loughton (Conservative, Centre-right): We need both. The health checks are NICE-recommended, but alas not mandatorily funded or instituted across the country. Frankly, all GPs need better training on mental health and mental illness prevention generally, and especially on perinatal mental health It was a huge success of the coalition Government that we recruited almost the 4,200 target for health visitors that was set back in 2010. We have lost as many as 30% of those now, since the responsibility for health visitors went from the NHS to local authorities. I am not saying whether that was the right move or not, but, given the cash constraints on local authorities, health visitors have turned out to be a soft target. That is a hugely false economy and certainly needs to be revisited as a priority by the health team The lifelong importance of early attachment should not be underestimated. It has been judged that for a 15 or 16-year-old suffering from depression—an all too common problem among teenage children in schools—there is around a 99% likelihood that his or her mother was suffering from depression or some other form of mental illness during or soon after pregnancy. The correlation is as close as that. Not getting it right during the conception to age two period will have an impact on many children for their childhood years and, for too many, continuing into their adult years too. Maternal mental health is very important, not just for the mother herself but for her children and the surrounding family Let us not underestimate the impact this has on fathers as well. I will be ruled out of order if I go too much into the subject of male mental health—although I hope we have a debate on male mental health too—but the impact of poor attachment between a mother and baby has significant impacts on fathers. It is important that they are also given every help and support to have that attachment to their children. Too often, children’s centres and other support mechanisms are mum-centric and we overlook the role of the father. The father has an important role to play in the life of the child and an important support role to play in the physical and mental health of his partner, the mother The Government have done an awful lot in recent years to raise the profile of the importance of mental health and flag up how we need to do much more. Importantly, they are also investing much more in mental health. We talk about the parity of esteem between mental health and physical health, and we all agree that that is necessary. Much has been done to reduce the stigma that was attached to mental illness just 20 years ago. It is good that so much more money is going into the area. We have a shortage of mental health practitioners and we need to make sure that we prioritise recruiting, training and getting them in service as soon as possible The criticism I have is that last year’s Green Paper on mental health included a lot about school-age children, which is important, but virtually nothing on pre-school-age children and perinatal mental health. Shifting the age profile forward and making it more about prevention and early detection—rather than dealing with the symptoms of a child who may already be damaged because their mother was damaged in their early years—is the way we have to go. We have to do much more in schools, but we need to do so much more before children get to school, by working with their mothers and fathers at an early stage.