/ Influencing policies
2017 was a year that reframed the UK's political landscape. The triggering of Article 50 set the wheels in motion to exit the European Union, and the Conservatives lost their majority in the general election in May.
/ Influencing policies
There is much to welcome in the Children and Young People’s Green Paper. It's direct commitment to help prevent mental health problems emerging represents a shift in focus looking upstream to tackle the determinants of these problems at their root.
/ Influencing policies
We’ve come a long way in public mental health in recent years. The language that we use is fundamental to that. We have managed, as a society, to move away from stigmatising and discriminatory terms like 'mental', 'maniac' and 'madman'. But what about 'murderer'?
/ Influencing policies
The 2017 general election was billed as the Brexit election. But despite that focus, we continue to see mental health move up the political agenda and be recognised as one of the key challenges we face as a nation.
/ Influencing policies
We are calling for robust political discussion of mental health during the election campaign, followed by a commitment by the next Scottish Government to a cross-departmental approach to mental health policy - not just a technical, mental illness-focused mental health strategy.
/ Influencing policies
In an article for the British Journal of Psychiatry on the 50th anniversary of the NHS, the then-President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Robert Kendell, suggested that it was "easy to forget, in the face of our present difficulties and discontents, that psychiatric services have improved out of all recognition in the past 50 years."
