Tag: Mental Health Crisis

Mental health problems in the COVID-19 pandemic: we need more careful presentation and interpretation of facts and less melodrama.
  • June 24, 2021

Since early on in the COVID pandemic there have been expressions of concern about its impact on mental health and, at least as reported in the mainstream media, those concerns have been couched in frankly melodramatic terms.  In May 2020 the then president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists expressed fears1 that “lockdown is storing up problems which could then lead to a tsunami of referrals.” The (by comparison) rather more muted claim that the pandemic was having a “major impact” on mental health came in the reporting of a questionnaire survey conducted later that summer2. The current president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, who has echoed his predecessor’s use of the tsunami analogy, attracted headlines towards the end of 2020 by suggesting that the consequences for the nation’s mental health will be the greatest since the second world war3. The doom-laden tone has persisted into this year, with The Prince’s Trust declaring4 that “The pandemic has taken a “devastating toll” on young people’s mental health” and a report from Bradford in West Yorkshire suggesting5 that “The pandemic has had a deep impact on children” who are “a lost tribe in the pandemic”.

There’s a tiresomeness to this sort of coverage, with its implication – familiar to those who regret the stigmatising of mental disorders – that there is something frightening and uncontrollable going on. But melodrama has other more tangible disadvantages.

First is the lost opportunity to conduct, and demonstrate how to conduct, a balanced discussion about the difficulties and uncertainties that attend the interpretation of data. Much of the media coverage consists of anecdotes – the personal interest stories so favoured by journalists – or small-scale interview studies. Data on health service contacts are problematic because of the degree to which disruption caused by the pandemic changes the relation between population prevalence of disorders and attendance rates. So what is, for now, the best evidence probably resides in population surveys.

However, results from self-report symptom questionnaires require more cautious interpretation than they are often given. Self-reported symptoms are mainly markers of distress, and although very high scores can be an indication of mental disorder the likelihood that is so depends upon the context. Two studies that have taken repeat measures suggest that most of the distress created by conditions during lockdown resolves quite quickly 6,7. The major impact headlined in one report2 proved due to a difference between 10% (previously) and 12% (at the time of the survey) in endorsement of a question about thoughts of suicide but did not spell out how often such thoughts are an accompaniment of distress and lead neither to suicide attempts nor to suicide – suicidal thoughts in population surveys are about 1000 times more common than suicides in the same population.

A bias in thinking about attribution arises with this use of language. A few attempts have been made to link Government policy to an increase in mental health problems among the young8, but for the most part no explicit suggestions are made. Instead the resort to analogies with war or natural disaster and talk of unprecedented crisis implicitly leads to foregrounding of the pandemic as the main explanation for mental health problems. To be sure, there are stresses in the current situation but there are also longer-term forces at play9-11. Years of government austerity strategy have done great damage not just to mental health services but to community assets, employment stability and family security – the main resources that constitute resilience for the most vulnerable in society.

Mental health is a vague umbrella term that is used to cover everything from the boredom and frustration that so many of us feel for being unable to see friends or go out socially, to severe mental illness. Not all mental health problems require treatment from the mental health services. Even before the pandemic something like a third of those identified in the Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey12 as having depression had not been so diagnosed by a professional. A third of adults referred to the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) service do not attend for the first appointment – voting with their feet 13.

Of course we need better mental health services. We also need to repair the damage done by years of austerity to schools, community resources and the quality of life of the poor and disabled. And the mental health services need to be planning about exactly where their efforts are best placed – blanket statements about mental health do not help with thinking about who needs exactly what sort of assistance, either preventive or therapeutic. These are challenging tasks the public and government support for which isn’t going to be recruited by melodrama rather than reasoned analysis and careful presentation of the facts.

  1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52676981 accessed 12 February 2021
  2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54616688   accessed 12 February 2021
  3. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/27/covid-poses-greatest-threat-to-mental-health-since-second-world-war accessed 12 February 2021
  4. https://www.princes-trust.org.uk/about-the-trust/news-views/tesco-youth-index-2021 Accessed 12 February 2021
  5. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55864573 Accessed 12 February 2021
  6. Fancourt D, Steptoe A, Bu F. Trajectories of anxiety and depressive symptoms during enforced isolation due to COVID-19 in England: a longitudinal observational study. The Lancet Psychiatry. 2020 Dec 9.
  7. Shevlin, Mark and Butter, Sarah and McBride, Orla and Murphy, Jamie and Gibson-Miller, Jilly and Hartman, Todd K. and Levita, Liat and Mason, Liam and Martinez, Anton P. and McKay, Ryan and Stocks, Thomas V.A. and Bennett, Kate and Hyland, Philip and Bentall, Richard P., Modelling Changes in Anxiety-Depression and Traumatic Stress During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the UK: Evidence for Population Heterogeneity in Longitudinal Change. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3749211 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3749211
  8. Townsend, E COVID-19 policies in the UK and consequences for mental health, The Lancet Psychiatry, 2020; 7(2): 1014-1015,
  9. British Medical Association. Cutting away at our children’s futures: austerity and child health. https://www.bma.org.uk/media/2060/cutting-away-at-our-childrens-futures-austerity-child-health-guuk-2016.pdf accessed 12 February 2021
  10. Cummins I. The Impact of Austerity on Mental Health Service Provision: A UK Perspective. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2018 Jun 1;15(6):1145. doi: 10.3390/ijerph15061145.
  11.  https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/05/21/young-people-were-reporting-deteriorating-mental-health-even-before-covid-19-struck-we-need-to-take-their-concerns-seriously-going-forward/ accessed 12 February 2021
  12. Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, 2014 https://files.digital.nhs.uk/pdf/t/6/adult_psychiatric_study_ch2_web.pdf accessed 12 February 2021
  13. Improving Access to Psychological Therapies Annual report 2019-20 https://files.digital.nhs.uk/B8/F973E1/psych-ther-2019-20-ann-rep.pdf accessed 12 February 2021

A shorter version if this comment appears in BMJ Opinion

Should the police be included in mental health crisis teams?
  • April 27, 2021

A spin-off from the practice of police officers wearing body cams is that the footage (in the UK) provides material for fly-on-the-wall documentaries about what day-to-day police work is like. One of the insights you learn from that TV coverage is how often the police are called to incidents where a significant part of what’s going on is explained by the mental health problems of one or more of the protagonists. And one part of that work is generated by people who repeatedly access the crisis services, either by calling 999 or by presenting their distress outside the home to others who then call the emergency services.

It is widely accepted that responses to this phenomenon of frequent crisis contact are not always effective. One recent development has been the emergence of the High Intensity Network of teams delivering what is known by the (frankly silly) name of Serenity Integrated Mentoring. These teams include both mental healthcare staff and police officers, share information and decided on a plan aimed at reducing this so-called high intensity service use.  That plan can include the possibility of formal action by the police, including the use of community behaviour orders or prosecution. I have recently become aware of this scheme and of some of the concerns being raised by patients who have experience of it and by service user activists. I had been alerted to it by a friend who is a service user and activist, and from my reading of social media posts by those people seeking an investigation and curtailing of this activity.  I have come to the conclusion that there are indeed some important concerns being raised: this is not just a Twitter storm in a teacup. I will outline what I take to be the main issues.

First there is the practice of sharing confidential clinical information with police officers. This has been justified by an appeal to the idea that people are only included in the scheme in an emergency, and that sharing is therefore in their best interests.

Here for example is a Tweet from the Network’s director. It is clear however that this idea of data sharing as high-threshold urgent action is being stretched to justify routine sharing of clinical information on all patients managed by the team. To quote the Network’s own description of the people under consideration “They are constantly an emergency case, just fluctuating at different levels of intensity, causing varying levels of impact. Our strong argument therefore is that all agencies involved in the network can share personal data and clinical data about these service users at any time, both in a preventative capacity when they are not using emergency services and in a reactive capacity when they are.”

Second, there is a question about informed consent from patients in the scheme, who must by definition have mental capacity.  There is much made in HIN/SIM documents of the need for consent, and it is said that lack of consent (telling described as “refusal to engage with mentors”) must be respected.

Here is a slide from a talk given about SIM by a team member. The nature of consent in this situation is highly problematic, since it is clear that in these integrated teams the prospect of coercion remains an active option for those who engage in what the team consider undesirable behaviour and yet who “fail to engage”.

The SIM operational delivery guide confirms this overlap of processes, with clinical staff able to contribute to the discussions about police responses to antisocial or illegal behaviour and police able to contribute to discussions about clinical risk management.

Some of the vocabulary used in HIN/SIM documents is not reassuring when seen from a service user perspective. For example stating that “The project team will be dealing with service users with often high risk, malicious and litigious behaviours.” and suggesting (as in this Tweet from the director) that patients do not have the right to share and discuss their care plan with people of their choosing. The FAQ section of the HIN/SIM website notes “Our teams operate multi-agency panels each month to assess which patients should have their consent removed…”

This approach, implying a seamless move from therapeutic responses to coercive responses, is one of the commonest complaints evident in online discussion of the scheme. Because police involvement is evident in all aspects of the process then consent to participate can hardly be given without a sense of duress.

Third, there is a question about evaluation of the scheme and especially assessment of harms. A startling number of benefits are claimed for the mentoring scheme – based it has to be said on minimal evidence: in truth there has not been a substantial independent research evaluation at all, which is surprising considering how enthusiastically the scheme has been promoted. By contrast to the claimed benefits, there is no discussion of potential patient harms such as those that might be caused for example by people avoiding seeking help in a crisis or actively being prevented from doing so. Any deaths that might occur are described as accidental, including those attributed to (a new term to me) accidental suicide.  

It is hard to collect citable evidence on such outcomes from informal reading because so few people are willing to come forward in an identifiable way, but I have seen them reported by reliable sources and there is no reason to doubt that they happen, even if nobody is trying to quantify them.

Complaints are likely to be interpreted in particular ways “Making complaints against staff can often be a way in which service users (at times of stress) attempt to avoid consequences or responsibility. They can also be used in an attempt to distance themselves from the staff who are supervising them so that they do not have to continue with the programme.” And staff who have to respond to what are called allegations are invited first to watch a video prepared by HIN. “The video informs the investigators about the nature of high intensity cases and the behavioural disorders commonly found in these cases. It also explains the motivations for making false allegations and common behaviours that may be witnessed after the allegation has been made.”

In summary: the approach represented by the High Intensity Network has apparently been adopted by more than half the Mental Health Trusts in the country, despite lack of robust evidence for its effectiveness or harms. Reasonable concerns have been raised about the approach to information governance and the sharing of confidential information and about the blurring of boundaries between therapeutic (health services) responses and coercive (police service) responses.

Much of the promotion of this particular scheme has been individualised around the person of Paul Jennings, a policeman who started the SIM programme in the Isle of Wight and now directs the High Intensity Network. Jennings has a rather idiosyncratic take on the issues which no doubt influences the tone of debate: he talks about mental health problems in prisons as if they are relevant to this different context, and his rationale for SIM as a response to what he calls behavioural illness is a mixture of naïve behaviourism and a sort of paternalistic encouragement to people to give up bad habits. Nonetheless, there is more to be questioned here than can be put down to one person’s influence. The problems outlined about confidentiality, consent and coercion are inherent to any scheme in which health care staff and police staff are fully integrated into a single team. There is a serious question about whether the Royal College of Psychiatrists should be supporting such developments at all. It is a worry that so many psychiatrists are likely to be involved either directly or tangentially in this way of working, without these issues being resolved. There are other ways to develop productive working relations with the police and the other agencies involved with crisis care.

Acknowledgments:  There is an impressive social media presence on this topic.  As a start try searching Twitter using #HighIntensityNetwork or #Stop Sim. It is activist and service user-led work that has brought the problems to the fore – critical discussion led by mental health professionals has been bordering on non-existent. The quotes in this piece come from:  HIN/SIN Operational Delivery Guide (SIM London version, March 2018); SIM Business Case  and SIM FAQs (from HIN website www.highintensitynetwork.org unfortunately unavailable since June 2021)

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