Guidance to ‘get outdoors’ is not adequate for this well-being crisis

Back in March, the country locked down to avoid the possibility of the NHS being overwhelmed by Covid-19, the Government pointing to northern Italy and the doctors there who had been forced to choose which patients received life-saving ventilators. Last week, a second lockdown was forced on us for the same reasons. But for the NHS and third-sector staff who work tirelessly to help mentally ill patients, the heartbreaking decision to turn away people in desperate need of treatment is an all too familiar one.

Long before the novel coronavirus appeared and tested healthcare systems to their limits, the NHS frequently found itself in the position of being unable to give all patients with mental health issues the care that is promised to them in its constitution. Today, as more and more people report suicidal feelings and anxiety disorders, the system is not just at breaking point – it is beyond it. In May, a total of £9.2 million was handed by the

Government to mental health charities, in an effort to provide some emergency relief during the pandemic. But a letter to the Prime Minister signed by 18 mental health charities, including Mind, the Centre for Mental Health, and the Association of Mental Health Providers, shows that far more than this is needed to avoid a so-called “second pandemic” of mental ill health.

The figure of £20 million is not a number that the Government will want to hear just as it extends the furlough scheme. But it is not nearly as much as the £500 million spent on Eat Out To Help Out, and, in such a context, the Government’s continued unwillingness to hand any more money to the mental health sector seems both spineless and mean.

You do not have to be chancellor to work out that fewer mental health beds, coupled with an increased need for them, is going to have disastrous consequences. Yet this is exactly the situation faced across the NHS today. Bed spaces have been reduced by 30 per cent to keep patients “safe” from coronavirus, though there was a 19 per cent increase in people detained for mental health treatment during the first lockdown, perhaps because of the number of seriously mentally ill patients released back into the community without any proper care put in place, their beds deemed “non-essential” as Covid-19 spread through hospitals.

In recent months, we have been told again and again by the Government to look after our mental health by talking to each other, and getting out for walks. But all the walks in the world will not help someone in the midst of an episode of psychosis, or a person whose only coping mechanism for life is self-harm or starvation. Our leaders cannot talk about the well-being of the population, while leaving the most vulnerable members of it to fend for themselves. And until they provide proper funding for the mental health sector, it will be hard for anyone to take seriously their continued claims to care so much about the NHS.