Boost children’s NHS mental care
Health service chief says May’s £20bn must help treat problems caused by social media fallout
THE NHS must expand children’s mental health services to deal with the fallout from social media, its chief executive has said.
Simon Stevens promised “a major ramp-up” of care using Theresa May’s £20billion funding boost but said more action was needed to investigate the root causes of mental distress among the young.
He signalled that figures due to be published later this year were likely to show record levels of mental health problems among children. It comes after The Daily Telegraph launched its Duty of Care campaign, calling for stricter regulation of sites such as Facebook and Instagram.
Mr Stevens said: “There is a higher rate of genuine mental health distress and at the same time as that’s become part of the public dialogue and stigma has reduced, people are willing to come forward.
“The consequence is that as a result, we’re going to need a major ramp-up under any scenario of young people’s mental health services. That’s got to be one of the big things that comes out of the long-term NHS plan.”
The last comprehensive survey on young people’s mental health was in 2004, predating the explosion of social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.
It found that one in 10 children aged between five and 16 had a clinically diagnosed mental disorder.
Mr Stevens said that the research was “bound to show that the level of undiagnosed mental health problems and distress among young people is much higher than has officially previously been recorded”.
He added: “So, the question is what’s causing this? There’s a lively debate about that. But we can’t solely ramp up the NHS services, we’ve also got to look at root causes. There is a growing awareness that alongside some of the positive aspects of children’s online experience and social media, there are some important negatives.”
Tim Vizard, from the Office for National Statistics, said: “The world has changed a lot since the last comprehensive mental health survey. In 2004, Facebook had just launched, the iphone was still three years from its launch and the first tweet was yet to be sent on Twitter. We therefore need new national survey data that can provide updated estimates on the prevalence of mental health disorders in children, particularly in this age of social media.”
The findings will come from a survey of 9,500 children and young people aged from two to 19. NHS figures suggest that more than half a million children were referred to hospital mental health services in 2016-17. But experts said the statistics were likely to be an underestimate, with some data missing and submissions not received from a quarter of the country.
Much of the data on diagnoses is also outdated. The last published figures on self-harm relate to 2014-15. They showed the number of girls treated as hospital inpatients after cutting themselves had almost quadrupled in a decade, to 2,311 cases.
Earlier this month Mr Stevens said the NHS had been left “picking up the pieces” of an epidemic of mental illness among children, fuelled by social media, and urged Facebook and Google to take more responsibility for the pressures they were placing on the young.
In an interview with The House magazine, Mr Stevens said: “We’ve just had WHO recognise gaming addiction as a new disorder. This has got to be looked at by schools and by social media com-
‘Alongside some of the positive aspects of social media, there are some important negatives’
panies in the same way as – alongside the epidemic of young people’s mental health and distress – we’ve got this epidemic of childhood obesity.”
He also described the Prime Minister’s promise to boost NHS funding by an extra £20billion a year by 2024 as “a workable funding settlement” but he would not be drawn on claims that he only backed the deal because the Chancellor threatened to cut it if Mr Stevens did not publicly endorse it.
When pressed, he said: “I’m more than happy to be supportive of a significant funding increase for the NHS which will enable us to develop a longterm plan for improvements.”
could force them to do so by introducing a price cap on so-called “drawdown” charges.
Last night, financial advisers said pension firms were “deliberately” confusing customers with complex charges, while consumer groups urged the FCA to introduce a cap on drawdown fees without delay.
Billy Burrows, from financial advice firm Better Retirement Group, said: “It seems that companies are deliberately making their charges difficult to understand so customers ... don’t know how much they are paying. If even I cannot understand all the different drawdown charges then how are customers meant to understand them?”
Jenni Allen, managing director at Which? Money, said: “It is disappointing that the FCA has stopped short of calling for a charge cap on pension drawdown products that could stop consumers from sleepwalking into costly and confusing products that can drain the money they need for their retirement.”
The pension freedoms were introduced in 2015 to let savers spend their pension like a bank account, rather than buying a guaranteed income for life in an annuity. Savers over 55 can withdraw their money in one go, leave it wholly invested or combine both. Drawdown pensions allow savers to keep their money invested in the stock market while taking an income from it.