Young people are being failed by Scotland’s mental health services

Has there ever been a positive sentence that contains both ‘the SNP’ and ‘waiting lists’? New data reveals that under Scotland’s SNP government list lengths for children and young adults’ mental health services have risen this year, leaving just under 8,000 young people in limbo.

Waiting lists nosedived in 2022, going from over 10,000 people long to around 7,500. But the trend hasn’t continued, leaving First Minister Humza Yousaf’s new government with more problems. While 7,701 young people wait for treatment, the number of referrals is rapidly rising. In the last year, over 500 more young people have been referred to mental health services; those from the most deprived parts of the country were disproportionately affected.

Recent weeks have brought a flurry of bad news for the Scottish NHS with reports showing waiting lists had reached record levels and that over 18,000 patients had died while being stuck on them. The latest figures bring no respite for the Scottish government, which has again failed to meet its target of ensuring 90 per cent of young people start treatment within 18 weeks of being referred to CAMHS – NHS Scotland’s child and adolescent mental health service. Progress has been slow: over a quarter of young people are still having to wait longer than 18 weeks to be treated. 

The SNP has come under fire in recent months for its approach to mental health support after it was revealed that approximately 9,000 young people had their referrals to mental health services rejected. This is equivalent to rejecting 25 children a day, and an increase by almost a fifth on pre-pandemic figures.

As waiting lists grow, almost 700 fewer patients have actually commenced any kind of treatment compared to the previous quarter. Children and young adults are being ‘abandoned’ by the SNP, Scottish Labour say. Paul Sweeney MSP, the party’s mental health spokesperson, has branded the latest revelations as a ‘national scandal’ and accused the government of leaving ‘children and young people behind after years of neglect’.

But while mental wellbeing minister Maree Todd has admitted that ‘more work needs to be done’, she has heralded traces of ‘significant and sustained progress’ shown by the figures, despite ‘an increasing number of referrals for the services’.

Progress, though, isn’t happening quite fast enough. It hardly needs to be stated that, untreated, mental health problems can wreak havoc on a young person’s quality of life – and society more generally. They are, for example, at a greater risk of becoming unemployed, homeless, ending up in long-term care or dying younger. 

And society suffers too – take the NHS as a prime example. Over the last five years, more than 75,000 staff have taken time off work due to mental health-related illnesses. Granted these are adults, not patients who have been failed by CAMHS, but the young people who are currently being left untreated are the county’s next generation of workers. As Sweeney states, ‘the SNP must make mental health a priority’.

Can the current government turn things around? Though Todd cited the increasing workforce of CAMHS as a success (it has ‘more than doubled’ in the last 16 years), any improvements brought about by this haven’t quite trickled down. As more reports on the SNP’s progress in Scotland come out, Humza Yousaf will be watching his in-tray steadily pile up…