For many deemed not fit to work, a job is best medicine

WITH the 80th anniversary of VE Day coming up in May, have we lost the resilience that helped us through wartime? Health Secretary Wes Streeting seems to think so. Over the weekend, he faced a backlash after claiming there was an over-diagnosis of mental health with too many people being “written off”.

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Mental health charity Mind warned it was important to be “extremely careful” with the language around diagnoses to avoid stigmatising people. Another charity, Rethink Mental Illness, responded that pressures in the system created a “tremendous struggle” for people to get diagnosed. “The crisis in the nation’s mental health is very real,” its deputy chief executive declared.

The Health Secretary was alive to the upset his comments were going to stir up in the mental health lobby and so went on to say there were “too many people who just aren’t getting the support they need”. He then highlighted a pledge to recruit 8,500 more mental health staff to cut waiting lists.

To a psychiatrist, this looks a bit like the minister is suffering from some kind of “split personality”. If there is overdiagnosis, too many are being diagnosed who haven't really got a condition. Yet if you are recruiting more staff to cut waiting lists, surely you’re offering treatment to people who weren't really ill in the first place?