The Mirror’s Assistant Editor, Columnist and Football Writer, Darren Lewis, weighs in on Health Secretary Wes Streeting’s ‘dangerous’ comments about mental health problems being over-diagnosed
We need to talk about Wes Streeting. Largely because his most recent remarks around mental health over the weekend were stupid, dangerous and a disgrace.
The Health Secretary seems to be suffering from an obsession with wanting to play to the right-wing gallery in the same way his boss, Sir Keir Starmer, did ahead of last year’s election with his appalling comments on immigration. Streeting said this to the BBC at the weekend: “Here’s the other thing, mental wellbeing, illness, it’s a spectrum and I think definitely there’s an overdiagnosis but there’s too many people being written off.”
You could easily be thinking you were listening to a Tory Cabinet minister occupying government before the arrival of the supposed “grown ups” last summer. Instead this was a Labour politician waving away the country’s mental health crisis so he could justify government cuts to the benefits system.
And the inference from Streeting’s clueless remarks was that those people with mental health diagnoses are a burden on the taxpayer. His comments even reeked of a suggestion that some are trying to cheat the system.
And Streeting should know better. Far better. As has been pointed out by the mental health charity Mind, politicians need to be careful with language to avoid stigmatising individuals.
Streeting’s self-satisfied, ill-considered outburst could easily dissuade someone in need from seeking help, fearing they’ll be perceived as trying to pull the wool over their employer’s eyes.
The truth, right now, is that it is difficult to get a consultation at all, let alone an overdiagnosis, with the healthcare system in a mess. People signing off work are doing so because they are struggling to cope and can’t get an appointment to get help.
And here are some numbers for Streeting, who seems incapable of joining the dots. According to the Samaritans, suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50 in the UK, with 17.1 deaths per 100,000 last year, compared to 5.6 per every 100,000 women.
Right across the UK, waiting lists for mental health services stand at over 12weeks. The shortage of mental health professionals is at a critical level. Go back six years and in 2018/19, around 2.7million people were in dialogue with mental health services. Now it is more than 3.8million.
Over a quarter of a million children and young people in England – some 270,300 – are waiting for mental health support at any one time after being referred to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. In some cases, kids in extreme need are forced to wait years.
Some are sent to pupil referral units when their education, indeed their lives, could be saved if mental health professionals were able to treat them sooner. Around 300,000 children currently at school, that is one in every classroom, have Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder.
Yet teachers across the country have little or no idea how to identify the symptoms, let alone make provision to cater for our workforce of the future. Streeting is playing up to the right-wing beliefs that those unable to work are feckless and lazy and trying to cheat the system.
Many of those beliefs are spawned by rich men trying to get richer at the expense of the lowest paid. You’d think 42-year-old Streeting, who purports to be a forward-thinking politician with his finger on the pulse, would be aware of this context.
Instead he comes across as yet another in a long line of politicians more interested in power and status than following up on his and his party’s promises to the electorate.