Our children and young people are near crisis point
THE POSTCODE lottery in mental healthcare our children face is simply unacceptable. If this was happening in any other part of the health service there would be a huge public outcry – imagine a child in any part of the country having to wait three years to be seen for a broken leg. And yet the consequences are just as devastating.
Our children and young people are reaching crisis point – selfharming and attempting suicide – before they receive help. All of us want a world in which we look out for one another and where young people feel supported and hopeful about the future.this cannot go on and we must, as a society, find solutions to this burning injustice.
The global pandemic has been hard on most of us, but we all have children and young people in our lives who are finding life especially tough.
As well as the usual pressures of growing up, our children have had to adjust to disruption to their education, ever bleaker work prospects and isolation from friends and family.
While as parents, carers and grandparents we have done our best to support them, a record number of children and young people are being referred for specialist mental health treatment.
Despite the incredible efforts of NHS staff to help as many young people as they can in desperate circumstances, waiting times have been rising too.we must fix this.
Because behind the figures are young people like Luke (featured on pages 18 and 19), who faced multiple waits for services over several years. This makes no sense for our children, for us as families or for us as taxpayers.
But there have been some positive signs in these dark times too.
More and more of us are talking about our mental health, taking time to be a source of support for each other and the children and young people in our lives.
We all have a role to play in creating a fairer and kinder society for them to grow up in.
We need urgent investment in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS).
But as a society we must also have a sharper focus on supporting young people early on, so our children get help when they need it.
No young person should have to reach crisis point with their mental health before they are seen.
The good news is that we know what needs to change, because young people have told us what they need: that whatever they’re going through, there is somewhere that they can turn, in their community, without having to wait for things to get worse.
Last year, Youngminds began campaigning for the Government to fund a network of early support hubs in every community. These hubs allow young people to walk in and get support for their mental health on the spot, without having to make an appointment or meet a clinical threshold.
A handful already exist and we know they work in preventing more serious mental health issues and relieving pressure on the NHS.
The young people involved in the work at our charity also tell us what a difference having a hub like this in their community would have made to them.
The Government has recently announced it will soon launch a long-term plan for mental health for the next decade, which presents an opportunity to introduce these hubs. Half of all mental health problems emerge before someone reaches the age of 14, so young people must be at the heart of this plan.
Before the pandemic we saw increased investment in young people’s mental health over several years and progress being made in the numbers of children being seen by CAMHS in some parts of the country.
But the goalposts have drastically shifted and with a sharp rise in the numbers of children experiencing mental health problems, the gap between need and support available is only widening.
The Government must take stock and use this long-term plan to get on the front foot.
CRUSADE LET’S FIGHT FOR OUR CHILDREN’S
MENTAL HEALTH
Half of all mental health problems emerge before someone reaches the age of 14