Nearly ten million people in England, including 1.5 million children, are projected to need care for mental health issues such as psychosis, depression, anxiety, and eating disorders are experiencing long waiting times in the nation’s socialised healthcare system, the National Health Service (NHS).
The leaders of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the NHS Confederation told The Guardian that there are currently 1.6 million people waiting to be seen for specialised treatment for mental health, and a further 8 million people cannot even get on a waiting list, despite being considered as in need of support.
On top of this, some English regions are stretched so thin that mental health specialists are “bouncing back” patients at risk of self-harm, starvation, and even suicide back to their local General Practitioner (GP) instead of treating them, raising concerns that some will lose their lives for lack of care.
The chief executive of the NHS Confederation, Matthew Taylor, said: “We are moving towards a new phase of needing to ‘live with’ coronavirus but for a worrying number of people, the virus is leaving a growing legacy of poor mental health that services are not equipped to deal with adequately at present.
With projections showing that 10 million people in England, including 1.5 million children and teenagers, will need new or additional support for their mental health over the next three to five years it is no wonder that health leaders have dubbed this the second pandemic. A national crisis of this scale deserves targeted and sustained attention from the government in the same way we have seen with the elective care backlog.”
(...) Breitbart
