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The Tories have failed to tackle a growing mental health crisis

MENTAL health may no longer be a taboo subject — celebrities discuss their struggles with mental illness and members of the royal family launch websites aimed at improving mental wellbeing.

Opening up about a form of illness that will affect one in four people is a step forward, but Labour’s revelation that patients are being sent hundreds of miles across the country for treatment shows that the government is failing them.

Dozens of Mental Health NHS Trusts report sending vulnerable people more than 100 miles to find them a hospital bed — the extreme end seeing a sufferer in Dorset transported all the way to Durham.

There is no secret as to why. The number of mental health beds available on the NHS has been slashed in the austerity years, down from 26,929 when the bankers’ crash hit in 2007-8 to 18,730 by 2016-17 — a 40 per cent drop, sharper even than the 17 per cent reduction in hospital beds overall over the same period.

This is clearly not a response to reduced need for mental health treatment. Suicide is the single biggest cause of death for men under 45 in Britain. Earlier this summer we learned that a quarter of 14-year-old girls have self-harmed. The NHS reports increases in people seeking help for depression and anxiety.

The government will argue that a reduction in beds does not reflect complacency about mental health. The decline in inpatient treatment dates back to the Thatcher government, which promoted “care in the community” alongside its creation of the NHS internal market.

The 20 years up to the bankers’ crash saw 40,000 mental health beds lost through the closure of asylums and psychiatric homes.

The principle of supporting the mentally unwell in their own homes whenever possible was never at fault.

Nor do the harrowing stories of ill treatment in Victorian-style institutions suggest a return to that model would be positive.

These facilities allowed widespread abuse of vulnerable people while increasing popular misunderstanding and ignorance of problems which were removed from the public gaze within “madhouses” or “loony bins.”

But like most Conservative initiatives, the Thatcher government’s care in the community programme was motivated more by cutting public spending than by any desire to improve treatment.

As in the related field of social care, responsibilities divided between NHS services and local authorities have seen people fall between the cracks, while a constant squeeze on budgets has led to a general deterioration of services across the board.

And for one large segment of the mentally ill — four in 10 homeless people have mental health issues — care at home is quite simply not an option.

Whether a patient should be treated in their house or in a hospital should be based on the assessment of medical experts based on the needs of the patient themselves.

That some are being shunted from the south coast to the north-east in the search for a bed for the night makes it clear that the NHS has nowhere near the capacity needed.

Tackling Britain’s growing mental health crisis is not a matter for the NHS alone, and Jeremy Corbyn’s creation of a shadow minister for mental health shows that at last we have a major party treating the issue with the gravity it deserves.

Mental health is linked to poverty, the test-obsessed culture imposed on our schools, the objectification of women in a patriarchal corporate culture, the epidemic of loneliness in an atomised Thatcherite society. We need a social revolution to take on such deep-rooted problems.

But right away we need to be able to provide a bed for the night for any patient who needs one. That means electing a Labour government that will increase NHS funding and ring-fence mental health funding in particular, so it ceases to be the Cinderella of the health service.

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