MENTAL health services for children and teenagers are “dysfunctional and not fit for purpose”.

And too many people of all ages are being let down by the system.

That’s the stark assessment of the man whose job it is to try to drag mental healthcare in England “out of the dark ages”.

Norman Lamb is the Minister of State for Care and Support at the Department of Health.

He spoke to the Daily Echo in his office in Whitehall last week following our campaign on mental health, They Deserve Better.

He said the nation was beginning to take mental illness more seriously.

“I think we have reached a tipping point. Attitudes are changing for the better. People are now more willing to speak about mental illness and are less fearful of the consequences of doing so.

“There has been a conspiracy of silence about the issue and that has made it harder to get the financial attention it deserves.

“We are still to address the institutional bias within the NHS against mental health services and by that I mean you have very politically powerful access and waiting time standards introduced in the past ten years for physical illnesses like cancer and services like A and E.

“All over place you have your targets and rights to access treatment and then you go to mental health and there’s nothing. This is just wholly unacceptable.

“People have been silent about mental health, people haven’t been out there campaigning about it and so there hasn’t been the same kind of pressure on politicians to do something about it.

“Governments have been right to introduce access standards and targets but they left out mental health and that’s unjustifiable.”

This is slowly changing. The first targets come in next April in early intervention in psychosis.

Mr Lamb said he accepted that the CAMHS (Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service) was “dysfunctional and not fit for purpose” and was “letting young people down”.

He said: “The idea that we brand it CAMHS means nothing to anybody. And then we talk about tiers 1, 2, 3 and 4. It took me ages to work out what each tier meant.”

He added: “There needs to a huge improvement in CAMHS and that’s why I set up a task force in the summer involving all the relevant agencies and crucially young people, to drive improvement forward. It will not be a Whitehall whitewash.”

He said there needed to be much more early intervention through schools, modernisation of services and more resources.

Mr Lamb said failures by CAMHS pointed up a central discrimination at the heart of the NHS.

“At the moment you have awful stories where young people are told they are not sick enough to access a service and they have got to be a lot sicker before they can. That’s just outrageous.

“Why is it acceptable that you have a right to access a specialist if you have suspected cancer but no such right if you have a child in serious distress and in need of mental health services.

“It’s an unacceptable discrimination at the heart of the NHS and I can’t tolerate that.”

The minister, pictured inset, said targets and standards had to be introduced for mental health to put pressure on commissioners to fund services properly.

“The funding issue is the result of decades of neglect and underfunding. We can’t fix it overnight, it will take time.

“I am an unashamed advocate for better mental healthcare – we must embarrass the system into changing.”

Mr Lamb said every area in the country had to sign up to a mental health crisis care concordat to set standards and end unacceptable practices, such as detaining people in police cells under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act.

Dorset health chiefs and commissioners and Dorset Police have not yet signed.

“There is an absolute demand from me that this should be done by the end of the year and it will be utterly intolerable if anyone does not. They will be named and shamed.”

Mr Lamb also agreed there were “fundamental flaws” in the system, which needed to be addressed.

Who to call for vital help

  • NSPCC 0808 800 5000 nspcc.org.uk
  • Childline 0800 1111 childline.org.uk
  • MOSAC (Mothers of Sexually Abused Children) 0800 980 1958 mosac.org.uk
  • Dorset Action on Abuse 01202 732424 Dorsetactiononabuse.org.uk
  • ACTS FAST 01202 309 930 actsfast.org.uk