Young People’s Mental Health — House of Commons, 2016-10-27
Topic: Health
Timothy Paul Loughton (Conservative, Centre-right): I am delighted to hear that; I did not in any way mean to underestimate the hon. Lady’s contribution. However, when the hon. Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) held the position, she sat at the Cabinet table. I hope that that is still the case, and I would very much like to see my own party replicate that position in government, because this is such an important cross-cutting issue Mental health remains the Cinderella service of the NHS. Indeed, the report describes child and adolescent mental health services—CAMHS—as the Cinderella service of a Cinderella service. The whole question of parity of esteem and funding is important. We can have arguments about how much the NHS budget has increased and kept up with inflation, but in every year in which the funding for mental health remains static or, worse still, declines as a portion of the overall NHS budget, we are sending out a clear message that it is a secondary priority within the NHS, and therein lies part of the problem I do not want to be too negative, however. We are making progress, as are other countries. For example, when you go in through the main entrance of a hospital in Copenhagen, in Denmark, you turn left if you have diabetes and you turn right if you have a mental illness. And nobody cares whether you turn left or right; there is no stigma attached to mental illness. People are treated on exactly the same basis, and that is how we need to treat mental illness here. Despite the best intentions of many Ministers, that is just not happening in practice at the sharp end where our young constituents are trying to access the mental health support that they desperately need. It is certainly not happening in a uniform way across the whole country. As a result, at least one in four people in this country is still suffering from a mental health problem I have a particular interest in perinatal mental health, and I declare an interest in that I chair the all-party parliamentary group for conception to age two—the first 1,001 days. I am also chairman of the trustees of the Parent and Infant Partnership Projects charity. We now have seven parent infant partnerships—PIPs—across the country providing direct support and specialist perinatal psychological help to mums and dads with newborn babies. About half of all cases of perinatal depression and anxiety go undetected, and many of those that are detected fail to receive evidence-based forms of treatment. Alarmingly, at the time of the publication of the all-party group’s report, "Building Great Britons", in February last year, just 3% of clinical commissioning groups in England had a strategy for commissioning perinatal mental health services. The upshot of all that, as the Maternal Mental Health Alliance has calculated, is a cost to the NHS of £8.1 billion for each one-year cohort of births in the United Kingdom. That is the equivalent of almost £10,000 for every single birth in this country, and it is a cost that the NHS can ill afford Why is this relevant to young people? Nearly three quarters of that cost relates to the adverse impacts on the child rather than the mother. Followers of attachment theory, which the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) mentioned, will appreciate the strong link between achieving a strong attachment between the child and the primary carer and good nurturing from the earliest age—that is, from conception to the age of two, as our report puts it—when the synapses in the brain are developing at a rate of some 40,000 a second and the child’s brain, character and development are being formed. The earliest experiences shape a baby’s brain development and have a lifelong impact on that person’s mental and emotional health Research shows a direct link between what happens to a mum during the perinatal period and her child in later life. If a teenager aged 15 or 16 is suffering from some form of depression, there is something like a 90% chance that his or her mum suffered from perinatal depression. The link is that clear, so it is absolutely a false economy not to help mum out at that early stage. And let us not forget dad, who also plays a crucial role. Getting it right with parents and children early on is crucial to the good mental health of children and young people. This is not rocket science—technically it is neuroscience—and we should be doing it better, sooner Certain other factors have been flagged up in the report. My hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Andrew Bingham) spoke about many of them, including the peer group pressure that our children and young people experience. In fact, I have no children any more. My youngest is now over the age of 18, but we went through the teenage years together and I have seen these things at first hand. No one can go out in the morning without the latest iPhone, without checking Facebook and without tweeting what they are having for breakfast and Instagramming a photograph of it. And that all happens just after they have got up. The pressure to succeed in school and the hothouse of exams and testing are not conducive to the best mental health, and young people need support to help them through the challenges. We never had those challenges in my day, which I guess was even earlier than that of my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak. Social media is a huge influence on young people, and it was just not around in my day. I would hazard a guess that it was not around in your day either, Madam Deputy Speaker.