National Happiness, Immortality & Freedom Service.

BIRMINGHAM SALON BIRMINGHAM MEDICAL INSTITUTE EXTRAORDINARY MEETING WITH SHADOW MINISTER FOR MENTAL HEALTH LUCIANA BERGER MP

National Happiness, Immortality & Freedom Service.

Are the UK’s mental health needs just too much for the National Health Service?

Birmingham Chamber of Commerce,
75 Harborne Rd, Birmingham B15 3DH

1825-2000hrs Thursday  12th May 2016

Panel of special guests to be announced

In January 2016 the Prime Minister announced that he ‘pledges a revolution in mental health treatment’. In February 2016 the President of the Royal College of Psychiatry advised that ‘the NHS in England… committed to the biggest transformation of mental health care across the NHS in a generation, pledging to help more than a million extra people and investing more than a billion pounds a year by 2020/21.’ To enable this revolution to take place a ‘Mental Health Taskforce, set up by NHS England in March 2015, had responsibility for creating and publishing a new five-year all-age national strategy for mental health in England to 2020, aligned to the Five Year Forward View (FYFV)’. The question for us tonight is could this revolution ever be enough to address what our guest Luciana Berger MP referred to as a ‘perfect storm’?

In 2015 she informed Guardian Journalist Mary O’Hara that “It feels like a perfect storm at the moment. There are so many issues where we were supposed to go forwards but actually went backwards. The waiting times to access help early on are too long around the country – if you get a referral at all” Indeed the NHS England Five Year Forward plan seems to have goals which tie us in pretty impossible gordian knots.

In paragraph one the plan emphasised that the NHS currently exists in a world consumed by ‘global recession and austerity’ which perhaps explains why the first aim is to try to focus on happiness and wellbeing. Is there a hope that we can prevent costly ill health by all of us achieving an immortal state of bliss due to low sugar diets, no smoking, no alcohol, exercise and mindfulness?

Much linguistic dexterity about funding and efficiency savings is offered, but you do not have to be a health economist to understand that if there is less money coming in there will eventually be less care going out. Much is made of legally enshrined definitions of quality as ‘patient safety, clinical effectiveness and patient experience’.  Quality is the goal, but if the money goes to wellbeing, happiness and preventing ill health like psychosis, how do you fund safe and excellent experiences for those who already have psychosis? 

In these forthcoming five years how will the optimistic strive for quality accommodate those other competing demands particular to mental health which seem to pitch freedom against immortality. Alongside austerity the number of people detained subject to the Mental Health Act 1983 has also been growing with the CQC informing us that ‘there were over 50,000 uses of the Mental Health Act in 2012/13 – the highest number ever recorded.’  This deprivation of liberty is significant and last year’s newly published Code of Practice tries to tackle that head on by naming ‘patients rights & autonomy’ as its first chapters. Hopes to reverse the increasing trend of costly and distressing detention with increased freedom and wellbeing can rub up against aims for safety and the understandable severe distress caused by the tragedies of suicide and homicide. With every coroners hearing and homicide inquiry can come calls to increase scrutiny of people with constant observations and deny them leave from hospitals. Indeed if health professionals don’t deprive people of their liberty enough and someone dies they may now be more likely to lose their own liberty like David Sellu who was found guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence in 2013.

So in this brave new world, how can the NHS Mental Health Services meet the UK’s mental health needs? Perhaps the panellists and your questions will help us to see a few glimmers of light that could help us to cut these Gordian knots.