Mental Health

Debate between Charles Walker and Gloria De Piero

Thursday 16th May 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Walker]

It is not a crime to be ill. It is not a crime to have cancer, it is not a crime to have heart disease and it should not be a crime to have a mental health illness. What we need is compassion.

[Gloria De Piero (Ashfield) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Walker]

I give way to the hon. Lady, although I am going to get in terrible trouble in a minute for taking up too much time.

[Gloria De Piero]

I wanted to intervene because people were talking about family members. I have a close family member with a severe mental illness. It was a big part of my childhood and early adulthood, and remains a big part of my life to this day. It is so important that we have this conversation. It is not something that people share or talk about because of the stigma that surrounds it. Instead, people internalise it, deal with it and become their own expert, so I would like to thank the Backbench Business Committee for returning to this important issue. It is time to talk and time to change, and I thank the hon. Gentleman, along with Rethink and Mind, for their work in this area.

[Mr Walker]

I know that the hon. Lady is an expert on these matters. I was going to say in response to the hon. Member for Bridgend that there are experts in this place. I did not want to identify the hon. Member for Ashfield (Gloria De Piero), but, to her enormous credit, she has identified herself. She is a fantastic representative of her constituents, and it is a delight to have her here today.

We have to make progress on drug therapies. Lord Stevenson of Coddenham, who is known to me and the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) very well, is doing enormously good things in this area. He has established a charity with a significant budget to look into new treatments, pathways and the brain. The charity is called MQ, its chief executive is Cynthia Joyce and I commend its work to the Minister. I would also like to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Nicky Morgan), who cannot speak today because, according to some bizarre convention, Whips cannot speak in the Chamber, which is a great sadness, because I wish she could. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen and Rowley Regis (James Morris), who has done much in this area, and of course the hon. Member for North Durham, who has become a great friend over the past year and is a fellow musketeer in these areas.

I said that I would touch on suicide. We need to build mental health resilience in our schools. That should start at a very young age. It is a great tragedy that many young men and girls decide to end their lives in their teens and early 20s. It is a public health issue, and we need to address it.