NICOLE THOMAS

COLUMNIST

WOMEN across Wales are angry and concerned.

Throughout summer 2018 Hafal held events in every county in Wales to find out what women’s priorities were for improving mental health.

The feedback has been eye-opening.

For a start, women are not satisfied with services.

We asked women across Wales how well they thought mental health support is currently delivered by public services.

Some 27% of respondents said they thought service delivery was poor, 41% said it is below average, and only 26% said services are average. No respondents rated services as excellent.

We asked our women what issues there are with current services. Overwhelmingly, the feedback was that services are underresourced, and the issue concerning women most of all is the inadequate support for girls and young women.

Waiting times for help from specialist mental health services for young women and girls remain dangerously long.

Specialist mental health services in Wales have made the mistake of extending their reach into areas of work better delivered by professionals with a brief to support young people, especially teachers and youth workers. These professionals of course also need the resources, training and confidence to support all but those with high needs.

Women across Wales are also vocal about the overprescription of anti-depressants (rates have doubled in the past decade) and the limited access to psychological therapies.

This is a national scandal: the over-reliance on cheap drugs and lack of psychological therapies is putting Wales distantly behind England in the quality of its service to women.

Women are also concerned that Wales lacks sufficient perinatal and eating disorders services, that waiting times for services are too long, and that there is a lack of support for carers’ mental health.

Finally, there are also serious concerns about lowquality hospital environments where female patients don’t feel safe, and about sending too many women with a mental illness to prison – and often for quite minor offences from nonpayment of fines, or petty crime.

Some of these women have been forced into such crimes by coercive partners and a lack of support and when they are sent outside Wales to prison their children suffer, and may end up in care.

The issues raised above have, of course, been discussed many times before. But we are tired of talk. Our campaign, Deeds Not Words, is about action, not words. And now that we are at the end of the campaign, we demand action.

Despite great individual understanding and aspirational policy documents from the Welsh Government our concern is that the improvement in mental health services so far is about words not deeds.

We do not believe that the reasonable expectation of personal independence, financial security, equal relationships, and living safely and at ease in the community is the experience of most women in Wales.

We are calling on women in Wales with power and influence to listen to what women have told us about mental health services and support, and to change policies and legislate in order to support those women who are most vulnerable. We also expect more from those men in power in a system that has consistently failed to deliver for women.

Specifically, we are calling on the Welsh Government for a reduced focus on restructures, reorganisations, fine words and glossy documents and an increased focus on actions to achieve positive outcomes, improvements to services, and real changes to address the inequalities faced by women. The Welsh Government has set an agenda and it is for them to make sure that services in Wales deliver to that.

As an organisation, we want to lead by example. We are committed to supporting 10 key actions identified by the campaign, and we will continue to fight for the right to high-quality care for all women affected by mental illness and their carers.

We pledge to provide services which lead by example, which are led by women, which empower women to take control of their own lives, and which are ambitious for recovery.

We hope that one day services such as these will be the norm for women in Wales affected by mental illness – and we’ll keep fighting until this is the case. But there’s a long way to go.