My first contact with Liverpool Mental Health Consortium (LMHC) was in February 2003, when I wrote them a very terse letter complaining bitterly that I had been unable to access a place at their national Snakes & Ladders Conference & denouncing them for exclusivity & poor communication.
Fast-forward 9 months, & they advertised a post with a person specification clearly stating that lived experience of mental distress was a ‘desirable quality’.
Mental health services will be cut further unless the government reforms the NHS funding system to give them a fairer settlement, the boss of an under-fire provider has warned.
Michael Scott, chief executive of Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust, told Community Care that the current NHS payment system drove commissioners to divert more funds into acute hospitals at the expense of mental health and community providers. Unless more funding is allocated to mental health, trusts will “simply have to reduce services”, he said.
Mental health spending cuts forecast By Sophie Hutchinson Health correspondent From the section Health Mental health trusts in England are forecasting significant cuts to their funding over the next four years, figures seen by the BBC suggest. Data from three-quarters of trusts shows from 2014-15 to 2018-19 income is expected to fall by 8% in […]
Welfare cuts will push Britain’s mental health services towards crisis
Secretary of State for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), Iain Duncan Smith, recently proposed a further £12 billion of cuts to benefits. Making such cuts is likely to disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, including those with mental health problems and other disabilities. After all, approximately half of people who need support from the disability benefit Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) do so because of their mental health.
A mental health campaigner who convinced supermarkets to withdraw offensive Halloween ‘mental patient’ costumes from their stores killed herself at a psychiatric unit, an inquest has found.
Work by Rebecca Luscombe, known as Becki, went national in 2013 when she successfully started a Twitter campaign which resulted in the outfits being taken off supermarket shelves.
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Less than two years ago, 50-year-old David tried to take his own life in a council house in Salford. You can still see the scars when he stretches out his arm to light a roll-up cigarette.
“Everything just builds up after a while. I was walking around thinking where I was going to get money from, what [was] I going to do about the kids, how was I going to survive?” says David, as his two daughters sit quietly next to him on the sofa. “I’ve been through the bins and all sorts, trying to make ends meet. I’m not proud of it, but needs must at times.”
Mental health patient admissions to A&E set to reach record levels
The number of people with a mental health condition admitted to hospital as an emergency is likely to reach its highest level ever this winter, a former health minister has warned.
An estimated 280,000 mental health patients will be admitted to hospital as an emergency in the last three months of 2014, latest analysis suggests as emergency doctors warned that overstretched A&E departments are the wrong place for people in mental distress.
In a nationwide survey 54 per cent of head teachers complained that local mental healthservices were ineffective in supporting the needs of pupils.
Nearly half the heads (47 per cent) said their increasing workloads were affecting their ability to identify pupils’ mental health difficulties at a time when such problems are on the rise in schools.
The survey, by the CentreForum Mental Health Commission also found that one in 10 schools still had no mental health and wellbeing training available for staff, in spite of Government pledges, and 65 per cent were not even assessing the mental health needs of their pupils.
The report comes at a time when emotional and behaviour problems among younger children are increasing because of higher divorce rates, financial pressures at home and the growing influence of social media.
Staff cuts and bed shortages are leaving mental health services “under unprecedented strain”, says the nurses’ union.
The Royal College of Nursing says there are now 3,300 fewer posts in mental health nursing, and 1,500 fewer beds, than in 2010.
At the same time, demand has increased by 30%, the RCN said.
A mental health charity said this was damaging the care patients received, leaving them needing long-term support.
