The subject of Social Care and Mental Health is much talked about within the social care community and local authorities, specifically about the mental health of young people. However, mental health services for young people in the UK needs cash, not empty promises.
With the announcement of the governments green paper on children and young people’s mental health services, the government announced a green paper on mental health, first aid training for schools and a few other measures. Mental health has been “a hidden injustice in this country” for far too long.
BBC Radio 1, 1Xtra and Asian Network launched a year-long campaign to encourage young people to explore issues surrounding their mental health. My Mind and Me aims “to get young people talking about mental health, to reduce stigma around mental illness, and to raise awareness and understanding of mental health issues that affect young people”.
To assist them in this, they have partnered with the National Citizen Service (NCS) to create a group of “social action champions”, comprising of a group of young people from across the UK, who will work with the stations to help shape the campaign, sharing their own experience and leading discussions on “the key issues around mental health”.
Giving young people a platform to discuss these issues is certainly important. There is nothing more powerful than hearing directly from people about their experience. To hear an individual talk on their own terms and in their own words allows for a human-to-human connection that cuts through cliches and stereotypes. The result can be transforming.
However, successive governments in the UK have presided over the decimation of mental health services and a chorus of voices, from patient groups to professional bodies, carers and mental health charities, have all been shouting the loudest, with the most urgent of warnings – it certainly wasn’t hidden from the government.
And between 2010 and 2015 funding for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) was slashed by £50m, despite massively increasing demand.
Even setting aside both of those things, consider how, as a society, we are failing our young people.
However inconvenient the fact may be, mental health is not some discrete entity. The mental well-being of young people cannot be considered in isolation from the issues that affect their lives: the education system, benefits, housing, employment practices. In all these areas, the needs of young people have been trampled on over and over again by the boots of political expediency. And now they are supposed to believe we care about their mental well-being.
It may be that My Mind and Me is going to address these issues and I very much hope it does.
