The CAMHS Crisis
Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in Britain are failing our young people. With vast waiting lists and an urgent lack of beds, mental illness in teens is becoming an epidemic that isn’t being treated as it should be.
UK Politics
Jasmine Bennett
There is a mental health crisis among children in the United Kingdom. While numbers grow and grow, waiting lists continue to be slow and overstretched. There are very little other options due to the lack of support in most schools, and the children of this country are suffering.
In the UK, there are no national standards for CAMHS waiting times, except for patients with psychosis or eating disorders, where the times are two to four weeks respectively. However, CAMHS is still subject to national NHS guidelines of eighteen weeks as a maximum waiting time. Despite this, in 2015 children were having to wait as long as three years for treatment — I was a Tier 3 patient for CAMHS and waited just over a year to be provided with any substantial level of treatment or therapy. I was only seen once my situation became critical. My situation unfortunately, was not unusual. The waiting list experience is part of a vicious circle. A report in 2016 claimed that out of 631 CAMHS nurses surveyed, only 14 per cent of nurses answered that the service was ‘good’ or ‘very good’, with 70 per cent stating that the services were ‘inadequate’ or ‘highly inadequate’. The CAMHS services are overstretched with very little funding, especially since the £50m cuts in 2015. This is perhaps one of many reasons why so many were left unimpressed by the pledge of £25m for CAMHS last November. The substantial stress that comes with that must be a factor in the decline of CAMHS staff. It was revealed in May of this year that this situation hasn’t got any better with funding, with a third of services facing cuts or closure. This therefore means less children are seen, and the waiting lists grow longer. Resources and therapists are often limited due to a lack of facilities and economics, meaning that the waiting lists grow and grow.
Many people are seen by CAMHS for an initial assessment only to be placed on further waiting lists for different therapies –I was placed on a long waiting list through my exam period to be given art therapy. This therefore left me in a critical state of distress in one of the most important periods of my life — but there was nothing that could be done. There was not the staff, nor the money to outsource therapists. While this is my own, personal experience of the mental health services under the NHS, there are cases that are very similar, especially for inpatients where a lack of beds (due, once more, to a lack of funding) means that they may be placed miles away from their home. The recent Channel 4 documentary Dispatches: Wasting Away: The Truth About Anorexia includes the story of ‘Naomi’ whose family live in Nottingham but the only available inpatient care was in Scotland, showing the toll cuts to mental health services makes on families, and also showing the great divide in provision of services depending on your location. There are certain regions are left entirely without beds for mentally ill teens. It should not be based on your postcode whether or not you get help.
In September, University College London published a report that has found that 24 per cent of fourteen-year-old girls are now depressed — around 166,600 girls in the United Kingdom. When wondering what could be causing this depression, one can’t help but wonder if it links to the new pressure in schools, associated with the hardest GCSE exams yet. Or perhaps, with the rise of social media, young women are feeling more and more pressure to be perfect in a world where nothing in the images is actually real.
Suicide is now the third highest cause of death in young people and the second highest of young women. This is avoidable with the right therapies and treatments being available fast for those same people. If this many children are becoming mentally ill, the NHS needs to have the resources to support those individuals, a mission that just isn’t possible with current funding. This funding crisis could be helped by allocated funding to local authorities being ring-fenced. A YoungMinds report claimed that ‘fewer than half the CCGs [Clinical Commissioning Groups] were able to provide full information about their CAMHS budgets’. This lack of accountability under the NHS is a disgrace. The documentary mentioned above also revealed that one local authority was spending funding provided for services on their IT systems.
If we are to have effective child and adolescent mental health services then we must make sure that the funding is going to the correct places, that there is support available in schools and that we listen to children. Children should no longer be turned away from CAMHS because their situations are not critical enough. We should be able to accommodate the problems that cause parents or teenagers to seek help. No child going through a mental health crisis should be miles away from home while seeking help. There are many horror stories about CAMHS, but unfortunately, few of them are fictional.
