Young People’s Mental Health — House of Commons, 2016-10-27
Topic: Health
Lyn Carol Brown (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend is right. The family is often key to the provision of the support that a young person needs, but a family may itself need intervention to gain the support that it needs to lead a mentally healthy life The national lottery funded a programme in Newham called HeadStart, which helps 10 to 16-year-olds, particularly in schools. It trains teachers in secondary schools to develop programmes that help to build resilience among their pupils. It also provides children directly with mentoring schemes so that they can learn from each other about how to manage mental health issues—it is peer-to-peer learning—and works directly with parents to show them how they can work through mental health issues with their children. Unfortunately, the scheme relies on lottery money rather than core funding, which means that its future as a core service cannot be guaranteed. It is often difficult to obtain the necessary proof that would persuade funders—including the Government—that core funding should continue, because the timescale is often not big enough to be persuasive Newham would love to run more services directly in the community, and more integrated services, because it knows that they make a real difference to people’s lives. M, aged two, and her baby brother T, just seven weeks old, were referred by a perinatal psychiatrist, who was helping their mother to deal with chronic mental ill health. M was still frequently breastfed, and showed a very insecure attachment to her mum. Her anxious, and therefore sometimes controlling, behaviour was making it difficult for her mum to wean her and to attend to the needs of the new baby, who was being bottle-fed. M’s speech was also delayed Following assessment, the family were offered parent-infant psychotherapy, which enabled them to reflect on the needs of both children, and gradually to help M to become more independent of her mum. At the same time, T was able to have more appropriate attention from his mum as the baby of the family. I am pleased to say that, following that intervention, M is more confident and her speech is developing. She sleeps in her own room, and has settled well into nursery. That is an example of our physical and mental health services working in tandem to improve real lives J was a 17-year-old who had been arrested and charged with possession of a weapon and affray. He had a history of violence and non-engagement with services. During the course of his referral to a youth offending team, the team became concerned about his mental health, and referred him directly to a child and adolescent mental health services specialist for an urgent examination. During that assessment, J was having suicidal thoughts, was highly anxious, and showed quite severe symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder as well as softer symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder The youth offending team nurse arranged for J to have urgent psychiatric treatment. He was put on medication for his anxiety, with an accompanying course of cognitive behavioural therapy for his obsessive-compulsive disorder. He will also be assessed for ADHD in the longer term once his more acute symptoms abate. I am pleased to report that J has not offended since he has engaged with the mental health services offered through the youth offenders team. That shows that integrated services are better for individuals, and better for the whole community Those are just a few of the stories that I have been told, but I believe that there are enormous challenges to the provision of community-based and fully integrated services. I am told that Newham would love to run services directly from general practices, but they cannot currently do so because they do not have the necessary resources. With the current staffing levels it would not be efficient, because staff would spend as much time travelling to and from general practices as they would spend helping patients Health professionals acknowledge that early intervention work often increases rather than reduces workload in the short term. Professionals in Newham worry that they simply will not be able to deliver the clinical hours that are necessary to help more patients. Over 50% of patients in Newham already have to wait for more than five weeks to see a specialist, and that figure can only increase when further cases are uncovered without corresponding additional resources. Some well integrated and community-based mental health services are delivered in Newham and, I am sure, throughout the country, but if we want to preserve and expand those programmes, we must be aware that they need stable and long-term funding. A good place to start would be ensuring that money designed for mental health services actually finds its way to the front line.