Changing culture, one voice at a time: MPs speaking out on mental health

By Andy Bell

13 years ago, just prior to the 2012 London Olympics, an historic House of Commons debate took place. It didn’t bring about a major legislative or policy change. But it was part of a cultural change that we’re still seeing today.

For the first time, sitting MPs spoke about their own experiences of mental distress and illness. Led by Kevan Jones, now a member of the House of Lords, four MPs detailed past and present experiences of depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and perinatal depression. Before it, no MP had ever spoken in this way. Indeed, until that same year, people who had been subject to the Mental Health Act were barred from ever standing for Parliament.

Thanks to their efforts and those of many thousands of people in other walks of life who have done the same, it is now more possible than ever for people to share their experiences of mental distress without fearing being treated badly or shunned. While this is sadly still not the case for everyone, we’ve come a long way in just over a decade.

Reminiscent of that day 13 years ago, in a Commons debate on the Mental Health Bill this month, another MP, Jen Craft, shared her experience with the House, which is worth reading in full:

“I was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder as a teenager, and with bipolar disorder in my 20s. In two and half decades with these conditions I have received good care, but sadly that is the exception and not the rule. I have never been asked what it is that I want from treatment, what it is that I want for my life, and how I can be helped to get there. I have received care that is patronising, reductive, inconsistent and non-existent. During mental health crises I have had to tread a fine line between proving that I am ill, and sometimes extremely ill, and proving that I am not so ill that I need to lose my liberty, because I know that more often than not, treatment is based not on therapeutic care but on risk management. Like thousands of others, I have had to create my own care package and my own route to treatment, because I made the decision that I deserved to live, and I deserved to live well—and also that my children deserved their mum. However, I am very aware that my ability to do this is based on a number of privileges, in no small part a very supportive family, which so many do not have.

“While I welcome the Bill for its advances in reducing the amount of detention and increasing the agency of those who are detained, I must call for a significant overhaul of community mental health services to prevent crises from occurring in the first place. We know that we can and must do better.

“I ask all Members to note that when we discuss people’s serious mental illnesses, we often talk as though they were “others”, which they are not.

“Let me say this: ‘There is someone standing here among you, a Member of Parliament, who has a serious mental illness. It does not prevent me from doing my job or from living my life; in some ways, it makes me better at it.’” 

In this short but powerful speech are some crucial messages for mental health policy. Perhaps most important of all, Ms Craft calls out the othering of people with mental illness which for too long has held back mental health policymaking. Too often, people with mental illness only reach the attention of national policymakers when a lack of support leads them to emergency services or the criminal justice system. It’s the same othering that means access and waiting time standards for mental health care are not given the same priority as those for physical health treatment. It also contributes to the impoverishment of people with a mental illness, half of whom are living with food insecurity in England today, and the lost years of life that brings to so many.

In recent years, we have also seen a reactionary trend that seeks to question or diminish people’s experiences of mental distress: asking whether the rising rates of mental ill health that are so evident around us are somehow due to ‘over-diagnosis’ or people lacking ‘grit’. Instead of questioning why our society is generating more mental distress, they seek to lay the blame on individuals and query whether ‘mental health awareness has gone too far’.

As MPs debate the details in the Mental Health Bill – and there are lots of details that need debating still – there’s a lot more that needs to be done to achieve the Government’s stated aim of putting mental health on a par with physical health. A cross-government plan, backed up by a policy test and a Mental Health Commissioner at the heart of government, would be a good start to making that happen.

In the meantime, people who speak out about their own experiences to challenge the othering of mental ill health continue to make a difference one step at a time, and help to foster the culture change that will make mental health equality a possibility one day.