By Ben Mills
1 in 4 people will suffer from a mental health issue in their lifetime, but is enough being done to help find treatments and improve care for patients?
We are caught in a mental health crisis. 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem at some point in their lives, and an already struggling NHS is finding it increasingly difficult to deal with the influx of cases of depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety and many, many others. Science and technology is advancing more rapidly than ever before, but are we doing enough to combat issues with mental health?
Despite the fact that mental health treatment and services account for over 23% of the NHS’s total work, a mere 6% of research funding to the organisation is spent on mental health, as allocated by the government. Research into mental health in young people, arguably one of the groups most affected by the increase in cases of mental illnesses, fares even worse, with just under 30% of all mental health research in total devoted to understanding the treatment and prevention of mental health in children and teenagers.
These are shocking statistics. They effectively show that still, despite mental health clearly being one of the biggest threats to our health today - a threat which will inevitably continue to worsen over coming years - the government and scientific fields see mental health as a secondary issue. But this is clearly a problem which needs to be at the forefront of medicinal and scientific research.
It isn’t fair that although £10.8 billion was spent by the NHS on mental health in 2015/16, this number is still vastly less than the country’s total annual expenditure on diseases such as cancer (£18.3 billion) or preventable lifestyle - based conditions (£11 billion). Though cancer, for example, is a far more lethal disease which most certainly needs all the funding it can get, the point is that mental health can have just as destructive impacts on peoples’ lives, with 6188 suicides recorded in the UK in 2015 (compared to 11433 deaths from breast cancer since 2014).
Aside from the funding which must be ploughed into vital research on curing mental health with effective treatments, into improving our infrastructure and service provision (such as hospitals and counselling in schools) to in turn improve our treatment of mental illness and into developing better strategies to help us prevent mental health becoming an even bigger issue in the near future, it is also imperative that we see a change in attitudes in science itself towards research into these fields.
Just 1.6% of Cambridge medicine graduates go on to specialise in psychiatry (a field specialising in the treatment of mental health), with the highest figure in the UK standing at just 4.3%. This clearly shows that there is an inherent lack and decline of interest in treating mental health, despite the fact that it is one of the most pressing health issues of our time.
What’s more, that lack of funding into research in the UK on mental health is meaning that we don’t have the resources to help develop the effective mental health treatments we desperately need.
So what can be done to combat this under-representation of mental health in science? The Royal College of Psychiatrists suggests that the answer may be to include mental health study at the core of the curriculum in medicine and other science subjects at university.
However, this still means that an interest in mental health, which we need from people in order to have the researchers and scientists of the future we need to help combat this crisis, isn’t cultivated early enough.
So perhaps a better suggestion may be to incorporate learning about mental health and specifically the science behind it at much younger ages; the GCSE and A - Level biology courses contain very little on the topic of mental health, but including more on the subject may be exactly what is needed to help spark an interest in the fascinating science behind why we develop mental health issues.
Furthermore, a greater understanding and awareness of mental health in schools would be sure to have significant impacts on reducing the impact of mental health in teenagers and young people. With 3 students in every classroom suffering from a diagnosable mental health issue, helping students to understand the treatment and prevention of illnesses such as anxiety, depression and extreme stress would surely see an improvement in the mental wellbeing of young people across the country.
There is an immense deficit in funding and attention in and around mental health today, and it is surely at least somewhat responsible for the mental health epidemic we are seeing across the UK and across the world. Who is to blame is not the issue - the focus should now be changing attitudes around the topic to help ensure a better future for sufferers or potential sufferers of mental health problems.
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