The UK should brace itself for a “tsunami” of adults with mental health problems unless urgent action is taken to help today’s children, according to one of the leading experts in the field.
Prof Dame Sue Bailey, chair of the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition, says the government needs to spend heavily now on mental health services for children if a crisis is to be averted.
“I describe mental health services as a car crash waiting to happen,” Bailey said. “The government is starting to do the right thing, NHS England is pulling the money through, but there are so many factors mitigating against it succeeding that it needs a financial fuel injection, right now.”
Ahead of this week’s Conservative party conference, when the prime minister is expected to identify improving mental health as a key priority, Bailey, chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges and a former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said baby boomers like her needed to do more to help young people, not just for their children’s sake but for themselves.
“We’d see immediate benefits, a better transition from primary to secondary school, a better transition of children into the world of work; they’d be more robust, more resilient.”
She suggested that her generation owed it to those that followed.
“The pressures on young people today are very different. We do know there has been a record number of phone calls to ChildLine from children with suicidal thoughts; that 55% of headteachers are reporting large number of pupils with anxiety and distress; and that rates of admissions for self-harm are at a five-year high. I think part of trying to convince both government and my generation [to invest in mental health services] comes from understanding that actually we did have it relatively well. This is one generation being asked to think about … the needs of the younger generation.”
Last week an inquiry found that more women aged between 16 and 24 were experiencing mental health problems than ever before. One in four had harmed themselves, according to the government-funded Adult Psychiatric Morbidity survey. The number who screened positive for post-traumatic stress disorder was found to have trebled from 4.2% in 2007 to 12.6% in 2014.
Many of the problems identified by the inquiry were attributed to pressures that had arisen in childhood.
“If there was more money going into schools to help children self-support around mental health problems, it would have an amazing payoff,” Bailey said. “You’d get better attainment for all children, not just the brightest, and fewer disruptive pupils. I think we’ve got a generation who feel that they are having their freedoms and opportunities taken away from them. This does require a substantive injection of funding into child mental health, for the voluntary sector, schools, community projects.
She said that supporting a mentally sustainable future generation was in her own interests because one day she would be “frail and elderly with incontinence, dementia” and would need people to care for her.
“Is this just another set of bleeding-heart special pleaders? No, it’s the thing to do if we want a sustainable society that can help young people support themselves. We need to listen to them more about what their problems are, with all the risks that surround them, such as all [those] that come out of social media.”
Last week the government announced that it was allocating an extra £25m to clinical commissioning groups across England to accelerate plans for improving mental health services for children and young people. It said the money would help to cut waiting times for treatment, reduce backlogs and minimise the length of stay for those in in-patient care.
But Bailey said the cash would still mean that, by 2021, “instead of one in four children being seen by child and adolescent mental health services through referral, it will be down to one in three”.
“We have to welcome what the last two parliaments have done, which is to recognise mental health and give it parity [alongside physical health] but we need to make a complete leap with extra funding. If we don’t, we are going to have a tsunami of children with mental health problems being taken into adulthood who are less able to cope in families and in employment.”
She acknowledged that mental health had always been vulnerable to budget cuts. “[With] austerity, things going wrong, mental health problems rise and it’s easy for money to go into other things. As a coalition, we’re monitoring that.”
- In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Helplines in other countries can be found here
Act on children"s mental ill health or risk national crisis, warns expert
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