Accessible Mental Health and Wellbeing

This week mental illness in the UK has been back on the political agenda as Ed Miliband names it “the biggest unaddressed health challenge of our age”. And rightly so. From my experience in working with vulnerable women and migrants I can say that access to mental health support services would have solved a lot of issues. But there are several barriers to accessing mental health support services (in this post I am primarily looking at low to medium mental health needs):

1.       They are very scarce or even non-existent. And they are non-existent not necessarily because they are not there, but because people don’t know about them or because they can’t access them. Undocumented migrants and migrants with visa restrictions for example aren’t able to access them at all.

2.       They have gatekeepers that are hard to by-pass. One example comes from GPs who would often simply prescribe anti-depressants and not refer patients on to support services such as counselling or alternative therapies. Another example of gatekeeping is the way in which current commissioning services are tendering mental health.

In Bristol for instance one larger organisation has been commissioned as the main provider, and a large number of organisations have registered as approved qualified providers(AQPs). AQPs can provide specialist services around employment, postnatal depression, disability, etc.  The way it is supposed to work is that people approach the main provider and are subsequently referred on to more specialist AQPs.

The way it works in practice is rather different. The main provider has set up its own generic support courses around mental health and are rarely referring people on to more specialist services. I’ve come across organisations which have had 1-2 referrals over a few months and they need at least 8 to start the service. If we look at postnatal depression, there are estimates that about 3 in 10 women will suffer from it. How can then only 1 woman be referred for support within a period of a few months? Gatekeepers!

3.       Despite increased awareness raising, there is still a lot of stigma associated with mental health. Numerous TV programs and ads talk about mental health and stigma. The extent to which they are useful is unclear because stigma is still here.

These issues need to be addressed soon if we want a healthy society and economic prosperity. We need to bring down barriers and ensure funding is available for mental health.

In recent news about Westgate shopping centre terrorist attacks in Nairobi, an eyewitness report seeing a COUNSELLING sign on spot, with a counselling service readily available to anyone. This is exactly what we need in every single community in the UK.  The stress and pressures of modern life will only continue to increase our mental health issues.