Only less austerity will improve our mental health

This is the first election ever in which mental health has been considered a
                                 

subject worthy of mainstream political discussion. The Lib Dems take the lead in this regard (closely followed by the Greens) with “equal care for mental health” being one of the five policy priorities featured on the front page of their manifesto, along with a promise of extra funding for the NHS.

In their Manifesto for the Mind, the Lib Dems set out in detail how their promise of an additional £500m a year over the course of the next parliament will be used to end “discrimination against mental health”, through better access to services, improvements in pre- and postnatal care, investment in children’s mental health, prevention, research and tackling stigma.

The Labour and Conservative promises are very much vaguer, indeed so vague in places as to be all but meaningless – the Conservatives’ pledge to ensure “that there are therapists in every part of the country providing treatment for those who need it” tops my personal piffle list. What does seem clear, however, is that politicians have finally clocked on to the fact that mental health is an issue of importance to many voters and, with more and more people prepared to speak out about their experiences, one that they can ill afford to ignore. Cinderella may not yet have made it to the ball, but she’s not about to go back into the scullery.

This is good news. Discussion is good. Additional funding is even better, if only to begin to reverse the decimation of mental health services overseen by the coalition government, with budgets in England having been cut by 8% in real terms since 2010, at the same time as demand rose by almost 20%, according to research by BBC News and the journal Community Care. But shocking as the treatment gap is, the most striking figure revealed by the research is that referrals to mental health services have increased by almost 20% in the space of just five years.

Though some of this increase will be due to the greater openness that now exists around mental health encouraging people to come forward, such a sharp increase in such a short space of time can only lead us to conclude that over the course of the past five years our society has become a good deal less conducive to mental wellbeing. What’s the reason? Austerity.