Successive governments refuse to acknowledge that mental illness overwhelmingly affects people from a lower socioeconomic class (Wes Streeting: there is overdiagnosis of mental health conditions, 16 March). There’s a reason that the prescribing of antidepressants is so much higher in areas where poverty is prevalent.
I’m a mental health nurse in a struggling NHS. I also struggle to make ends meet in an age where my outgoings leave me almost nothing. I pay high rent to a multimillionaire and am unable to save a penny. Nor do I really enjoy the fruits of my labour with my dependants.
This means that when payday arrives each month, it is a time of anxiety, low mood and stress, because I know that I will have to juggle my budget once again and figure out ways to give my kids a good quality of life. Mental health nurses are tasked with being “guardians of hope”, but when we see the ongoing assault on the most vulnerable, and billionaires ruling the world, it can be difficult to hold on to hope of our own.
Keir Starmer is proving once again to be another strongman leader with no political will to accept the evidence and truly address the inequalities that persist and worsen.
Name and address supplied
• Comments by the health secretary about overdiagnosis of mental health conditions may or may not be correct, but the debate about overdiagnosing people misses the point when it comes to deciding whether people are fit to work or not. I worked extensively as a mental health vocational adviser 20 years ago and was at the sharp end of assisting people with chronic mental health conditions to get back into work. It is not a matter of getting people to a position of 100% remission for them to be able to use their skills in the workplace. I helped employers identify “reasonable adjustments” that would assist employees who still had daily symptoms, but not serious enough to prevent them performing.
As for treatment, I witnessed the emergence of the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme, now called NHS Talking Therapies. Established on the back of the Layard report commissioned by the Blair government, its purpose was to get people with common mental health conditions back into the workplace. I’d like to see the data available on the efficacy of this programme, which was trumpeted as a solution to the problem that the country faced then, and is still facing today.
Michael Stockwell
Basingstoke, Hampshire
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