All-party group calls for better understanding of the social and economic causes of poor mental health

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A new report from the Beyond Pills All-Party Parliamentary Group says:

We have reached a crisis point in the nation’s mental health. Nearly a quarter of the adult population is prescribed a psychiatric drug in any given year, and a similar proportion of young people now meet the criteria for a mental health diagnosis. 

Waiting lists for NHS treatment are up to three years, NHS provision for psychotherapy is patchy and often of low quality, and interventions directed at the social and psychological causes of distress have been under prioritised.

According to the NHS Independent Mental Health Taskforce, mental health outcomes have worsened in recent years, coinciding with an increase in rates of suicide. Indeed, taking a longer view and looking at trends in mental health outcomes, they have at best flatlined over the past four decades and according to some measures have deteriorated.

Shifting the Balance Towards Social Interventions: A Call for an Overhaul of the Mental Health System endorses the proposals put forward by World Health Organization and the United Nations in their calls for fundamental reforms. It includes specific recommendations to bring about a radical overhaul in mental health care:

• boost provision for social interventions, including social prescribing and community-based resources;
• reforming the MHRA, the regulator of medicines in the UK and implementing a UK Sunshine Act for financial transparency;
• funding drug deprescribing services as well as a national withdrawal support helpline#
• reverse rates of unnecessary antidepressant prescribing, particularly among young people; over four million under 25s were prescribed antidepressants in 2022/3.

It concludes by calling for:

a paradigm shift away from the traditional biomedical model that has presided over poor clinical outcomes and the overmedicating of distress, towards a more holistic, person-centred approach that more fully recognises and addresses the social, economic and psychological determinants of mental health. 

It's encouraging to see politicians thinking about the social and economic causes of poor mental health. As the report says, the current mental health system is marked by an overreliance on psychiatric drugs, with nearly a quarter of all adults prescribed a psychiatric drug in any given year, and soaring rates of prescription for children and young people. 

There is also a failure to provide effective social, community and relational approaches, which has led to persistently poor outcomes despite substantial research and investment over four decades.

The Beyond Pills APPG has its own website.