Are we at a mental health turning point?

By Nick Triggle
BBC News health reporter

Liam Fox made it a central theme of his bid to become Tory leader and with two important announcements expected soon, mental health may finally be coming out of the shadows and into the mainstream.

One in four people suffers mental health problems each year

When Dr Fox launched his campaign to become Tory leader his choice of location was no accident.

The shadow foreign secretary shunned the glitz of Westminster and chose a north London church which now serves as a centre for treating the mentally ill.

While the typical Conservative topics of Europe and tax cuts featured heavily in his campaign, another high profile subject was, surprisingly, mental health.

During his campaign, which ended when he lost out to David Davis and David Cameron in the second ballot, he spoke out about provision of services, support to carers, research and even help given to prisoners.

He said the failure to address the needs of those with mental health was a "national shame" and partly responsible for the UK's "broken society".

High profile

The decision by such a high profile politician to campaign on mental health impressed campaigners.

Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of mental health charity Sane, said the Tory MP had "remained loyal to the cause of mental illness, choosing to put it at the forefront of his own and the country's political agenda".

She added his interventions were timely as "despite all the pledges, mentally ill people and their families are still being sorely short-changed and the psychiatric services struggle unfairly against the odds."

In many ways it is not surprising that Dr Fox, who used to work as a GP, chose to make mental health such a central theme in his case to become leader of the opposition.

I think what Liam Fox's tact shows is that mental health is becoming more respectable Paul Farmer, of the Mental Health Alliance

But the move marked a significant point for a subject that has remained a taboo ever since Victorian doctors started to explore the subject.

What now remains to be seen is will it act as a turning point?

Andy Bell, of the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, said mental health is now where race relations was 20 years ago.

Then race riots in Brixton, south London, drew national attention to the discrimination and segregation that existed in the Thatcher years.

For mental health, Dr Fox's campaign marks the start of a period when the issue may well enter the mainstream.

Mr Bell said: "It has been a Cinderella service for so long. It has been ignored, but that may well be changing.

Debate

"We are beginning to see a debate about mental health, about extending the availability of services and talking therapies.

"And in the next few months this could get even more of a profile."

The government is expected to publish the Mental Health Bill, which will propose measures to make it easier to force people to have treatment, shortly.

Draft measures were first published in 2002, but have had to be redrawn after unprecedented objections.

Then there is the white paper on out-of-hospital care, expected at the turn of the year, which is likely to propose a series of reforms of mental health services to make them more accessible and bring treatment into the mainstream.

One option is to have mental health clinics in more traditional settings such as libraries and gyms.

LIAM FOX ON MENTAL HEALTH "The way in which society treats those least able to play a full role is a measure of how civilised that society is" "The failure of quality provision for those with mental illness is our national shame" "It is very easy to criticise 'care in the community'. But we should not forget that in the not-too-distant past, mental illness was a guaranteed one-way ticket to an asylum"

Paul Corry, of mental health charity Rethink, said: "Mental health hardly figured in the Public Health White Paper last year, this white paper will be different.

"The Mental Health Bill will raise the issue for very different reasons. It involves all sorts of civil liberty concerns and will get people talking because of that."

Paul Farmer, chairman of the Mental Health Alliance, which represents professionals and charities, agreed.

"There is still stigma and discrimination surrounding mental health problems.

"That will take time to change, but will happen if we have a public debate about these things.

"Hopefully, we will have that in the forthcoming months.

"I think what Liam Fox's tact shows is that mental health is becoming more respectable. People are prepared to put their head above the parapet and say something."

But of course campaigners and professionals still face a battle to get the condition the recognition it deserves - one in four people will suffer some mental health problem in the course of their life.

When Dr Fox announced he was running for the leadership, one of his colleagues came up to him to tell him he would not support him if he kept talking about mental health.

Apparently, he said, people were not interested in that "sort of thing".