Alexa Knight
The government has released the latest wave of results from the much-delayed Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey (APMS), which monitors mental illness and treatment across the population in England every 7 years.
It confirms what we and many mental health professionals have been saying for years: more people than ever are struggling with their mental health - and they are not making it up.
More than one in five adults (22.6%) are being clinically assessed as having a common mental health condition, compared to 18.9% in 2014. That’s a 20% increase.
Amongst young adults the rise is even more drastic, with one in four experiencing a common mental health condition, a 47% increase from 2014.
If this was any other area of health, a rise of this nature would prompt a public outcry and and an urgent government response.
Instead, there has been a muted response from the government. This may be because the government has at times promoted a myth - that the numbers of people experiencing mental ill-health are overinflated. In fact the APMS data points to the risks of under-reporting, rather than diagnostic inflation. As APMS lead researcher Sally McManus said: “There’s no evidence from our data to indicate over-reporting, but in the past there may well have been under-reporting.”
The APMS is particularly valuable in this conversation, because it provides clinically reliable and credible data about mental ill-health. It uses high quality screening and assessment tools, which demonstrate levels of distress widely accepted by clinicians to indicate genuine illness. This makes it an invaluable tool for evidencing the extent of the mental health crisis – and its unequal distribution. In other words, thanks to this data, nobody serious can deny that England’s mental health crisis is real.
The data also confirms another vital fact for policymakers - socioeconomic factors, like a person’s job or financial situation, have a close relationship with mental health.
Problem debt and economic inactivity are closely linked to a range of mental health concerns including common mental health conditions and increased risk of suicide attempts. Living in one of the five most deprived areas in England makes having a common mental health condition more likely (26.2% prevalence in the most deprived areas compared to16% in the least). The good news is that, with some willing, the UK government can take political decisions that improve people’s living conditions and financial wellbeing, and at the same time, help to prevent poor mental health.
We need a response that is appropriate for the problem in front of us. The government talks about shifting to prevention and nowhere is this more vital than in mental health. We need to invest in the mental health of the nation, avoiding additional stress on our health and welfare services. We are calling on the government to re-build its decimated national public mental health teams and develop a cross departmental plan for mental health that prioritises prevention and addresses the holistic factors affecting our mental health.
These statistics make it clear that the time for dismissing people’s suffering is over. England’s mental health is getting worse – full stop. Now is the time for action.