More than 200 people have now signed an open letter to the Government calling for greater help.
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The campaign became cross-party when Alastair Campbell, former Labour government communications director, and Andrew Mitchell, former Conservative Cabinet minister, agreed to join.
Speaking on Premier’s News Hour, he said: “Many churches find that people who come through the doors with mental health problems are bounced out again because they don’t necessarily fit the mould of worship and order that might be the natural style of everyone there”.
“I feel driven to overcome this historic injustice”, Lamb said.
We note the many comments from ministers and opinion formers acknowledging the huge cost of mental ill health not just to individuals and their families, including veterans of our armed forces, but to the economy as a whole.
The move has been praised by British mental health charities – among them the Cornwall-based Invictus Trust, which was founded by the family of teenage suicide victim Ben Cowburn.
Citing statistics published by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the National Institute of Mental Health, Rep. Kennedy said in the letter that 55% of USA counties have no practicing psychiatrists, psychologists or social workers, despite one in five American adults having been diagnosed with a mental disorder within the past year.
They accepted that this will require extra investment, but argued that sustained funding in mental health services can lead to significant returns by reducing the burden on the NHS and helping people to stay in work. “There’s a wealth of evidence that if you intervene quickly with mental health you can stop the deterioration of condition but we don’t do that, we neglect problems dreadfully”.
Pardew noted that even though there has been “big changes” in attitudes to the issues during his lifetime in professional sport “we still have a long way to go before we can say physical and mental health are seen in the same way”. And so is the human and moral argument.
“For too long mental health and mental illness have been surrounded by stigma and taboo and I will support anything that strips that away”, he said. In effect, they suffer discrimination in our publicly funded NHS.
For the first time in three years, mental health reform bills are moving through both houses of Congress. This week the House Committee on Energy and Commerce will take up a bill introduced by Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) to boost Medicaid funding for treatment of mental health issues and create a new assistant secretary position within the Health and Human
Services Department devoted to mental health care.
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“Medicaid is the largest payer of mental health services in the United States, and over 74% of Medicaid beneficiaries are in managed care plans, comprising a large source of revenue for commercial insurance companies”, Rep. Kennedy wrote in the letter. People from these backgrounds face more frequent use of coercion, suffer more use of physical restraint, end up in contact with the police more often than others and have less access to talking therapies. “But now there is this growing recognition of mental ill health and the importance of addressing it”, he added. “We are making progress… but there is far more to do”.
