10.10.14
Government to fund Time to Change campaign for another year
The Time to Change anti-stigma campaign will be funded by the government for another year, as part of plans announced on World Mental Health Day.
Led by Mind and Rethink Mental Illness, Time to Change is in its second phase, which began in October 2011, with funding from the Department of Health, Comic Relief and the Big Lottery Fund. Funding was due to end on 31 March 2015, until today’s announcement.
Mark Winstanley, CEO of Rethink Mental Illness, said: “This is fantastic news, and will enable us keep on tackling stigma and discrimination.
“This really matters because stigma ruins lives. For some, it means not only having to deal with a serious illness, but also having to keep it a secret. This can be an incredibly isolating experience and lead to people feeling cut off from society.”
Latest figures from the campaign have revealed that since the beginning of the current programme of Time to Change an estimated two million people – or 4.8% of the population –have improved attitudes towards people with a mental illness. It also shows that there was a 2.8% improvement in attitudes between 2012 and 2013 – the biggest annual shift in the last decade.
The Mental Health Foundation highlighted that one in four of us in any given year experiences mental ill health. The organisation’s chief executive Jenny Edwards said: “An ongoing theme of our work has been parity of esteem for physical and mental health care.
“One of the great areas of inequality is for people living with a mental illness to receive active interventions on diet, exercise and smoking for their physical health to overturn the current 20 year gap in life expectancy.”
In a speech to mark World Mental Health Day, health secretary Jeremy Hunt has called for making “equality between mental and physical health” a priority.
Responding to Hunt’s speech, the Mental Health Network stated that it also supports the health secretary’s call for better data in mental health.
Rebecca Cotton, director of policy for the Mental Health Network, said: “As part of our Implementing Recovery through Organisational Change programme, run in conjunction with the Centre for Mental Health, we have been exploring how we can better measure quality and recovery outcomes, and recently published a report outlining our thinking on this.”
Additionally, it is hoped that the launch of the mental health data website, MyNHS, today, which allows people to access ratings for mental health hospitals, is a step in the right direction.
Dr Geraldine Strathdee, NHS England national clinical director for mental health, said it was “excellent news the public would now be able to see key information on their local service in a central place.”
The announcement has been made on World Mental Health Day by the Department of Health shortly after it was announced an extra £120m will be injected into mental health services from next year along with new waiting time targets.
City Hall in London today hosted an event in conjunction with the Mental Health Foundation and SANE, looking at the impact mental ill health has had on individuals and discussing what needs to be done.
Mayor of London Boris Johnson is now calling for increased awareness of mental ill health, which affects one in four Londoners and costs the capital an estimated £26 billion each year.
Victoria Borwick, deputy mayor of London, who hosted the event, said: “Today is about speaking up and getting comfortable with talking about mental health.
“We have heard from people with experience about what it means to live with mental ill health, and we as Londoners need to work together to keep the discussion going and ensure no one is left to suffer in silence.”
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