YoungMinds VS 'No Help' - Daily Mirror Headline

  

At our Hospital we get two newspapers delivered to the ward daily and we have a Current Affairs groups once a week in which we go through newspapers and rant and debate with one another. It's usually only in that group that I have any idea of what's going on in the outside world since I don't watch the news and I don't spend much time in the sitting room to be reading the newspapers but while waiting for Reflection to begin I noticed this headline: Scandal of depressed under 10s. I thought it fitted in perfectly with the YoungMinds VS campaign I'm helping to work on so here's...

The Facts:

1. 4,391 children aged 10 and under have received treatment for stress, anxiety or depression in the last five years
2. 2/3 of local authorities have had to slash budgets for early intervention schemes e.g. social workers, parenting programmes and educational psychologists
3. The World Health Organisation predicts that by 2030 depression will be the biggest health problem in the western world
4. The budget for young people's mental health services is currently 0.7% of the overall NHS budget.
5. One of the largest mental health trusts in the UK (South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation) treated 814 children ten and under last year.
6. South Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust took care of 102 young people in that same age group and over the same period. This has more than doubled from 2008.
7. Out of the 51 councils who responded to YoungMinds freedom of information request, 34 admitted to cutting their spending on child and adolescent mental health services since 2010. With Norfolk by as much as 41%

"We are investing £54million in improving access to therapy treatments for children. I have always been clear mental health must be treated with equal importance as physical health" - Care Minister, Norman Lamb

'The YoungMinds mental health charity urged he Government to stop cutting vital funding to support networks in a bid to prevent a child psychology crisis. Campaigns chief Lucie Russell said: "An increase in under-11s needing mental health services is a sad and very worrying indictment of the society we live in and the pressures children face."

As a result of this article I will endeavour to post a more personal blog about the lack of help for young people, which is one of the key, highlighted areas in the YoungMinds Vs campaign.

http://www.youngmindsvs.org.uk/