Austerity and a malign benefits regime are profoundly damaging mental health
442 psychotherapists, counsellors and academics condemn government plans and call on Labour and other parties to denounce anti-therapeutic practices
Welfare cuts will push Britain’s mental health services towards crisis
Secretary of State for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Iain Duncan Smith, recently proposed a further £12 billion of cuts to benefits. Making such cuts is likely to disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, including those with mental health problems and other disabilities. After all, approximately half of people who need support from the disability benefit Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) do so because of their mental health.
Because of the very drastic cuts by the NHS and Manchester City Council, it is quite obvious to Service Users, Carers and other members of the public that Manchester Mental Health & Social Care Trust, cannot provide Services in order to treat patients who suffer from “severe & enduring mental illness”, which is putting them at serious and dangerous risk, such as their physical health, their absolute poverty (e.g. homelessness, starvation, hardship etc), as well as their need for formal in-patient services and suicide or other premature death.
Manchester celebrities Shaun Ryder, Terry Christian, Rowetta and Claire Mooney are to lead hundreds of protesters in a rally against ‘appalling’ coalition cuts that have affected the city.
The Mancunian icons will lead crowds in what they are calling a ‘smart rally’— an emulation of the pro democracy demonstrations that took place in Hong Kong back in September 2014.
The lack of acute beds available to mental health patients has left the system at breaking point, the Royal College of Psychiatrists has said.
Illustrating the scale of the problem, the college said it understood that on one occasion last year there were no beds available for adults in England. It called for action to tackle the problem.
The college president, Simon Wessely, said: “There is mounting evidence – such as the doubling of the number of patients having to be sent out-of-area for care between 2011/12-2013/14 – that there are simply not enough mental health beds available in some areas.
Authorities in England have pledged to bring an end to the practice of detaining people with mental health problems in police cells.
The NHS, councils and police are now set to come up with plans for how they will achieve this, the government said.
Care minister Norman Lamb said real progress had already been made, and added that “in many parts of the country it’s now a thing of the past”
Young people’s mental health services across the UK are in dire straits.
A recent report by the Royal College of Nursing showed that government spending cuts have led to the loss of more than 3,300 mental health posts over the last four years and 1,500 fewer beds than in 2010.
A report by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) revealed worrying increases in the number of young people being treated in adult psychiatric wards.
A Tory councillor has provoked a Twitter backlash after claiming that food banks are only visited by “those with drug, alcohol and mental health problems”.
Mark Winn, who is also a civil servant with the Ministry of Defence and until recently held an appointment on Buckinghamshire council’s health scrutiny committee, hit out at what he called “the BBC doing Labour’s bidding” after watching an episode of Casualty on Saturday night.
In a nationwide survey 54 per cent of head teachers complained that local mental healthservices were ineffective in supporting the needs of pupils.
Nearly half the heads (47 per cent) said their increasing workloads were affecting their ability to identify pupils’ mental health difficulties at a time when such problems are on the rise in schools.
The survey, by the CentreForum Mental Health Commission also found that one in 10 schools still had no mental health and wellbeing training available for staff, in spite of Government pledges, and 65 per cent were not even assessing the mental health needs of their pupils.
The report comes at a time when emotional and behaviour problems among younger children are increasing because of higher divorce rates, financial pressures at home and the growing influence of social media.
A survey by mental health charity Mind has found that a whopping 83% of people who lost their jobs die to mental illness got worse on the scheme
