A MINISTER for suicide prevention is “not enough” to address growing mental health problems in this country, a leading mental health lawyer has said

A lawyer from one of the largest mental health teams in Shropshire and north Wales says the government needs to do a great deal more, and provide funding for extra support teams, as was announced last week.

The UK government made the announcement on World Mental Health Day that health minister Jackie Doyle-Price had been appointed to the new role of minister for suicide prevention.

But solicitor Elzbeth Kenny – a member of the GHP Legal mental health team – said that it also needs to address failings in the basic infrastructure of mental health care in the United Kingdom.

“The government may have appointed a new minister for suicide prevention, pledged £1.8m to the Samaritans to provide a helpline and announced plans to provide new support teams, but what is it doing, for example, about providing training for GPs?” she asked.

“Suicide numbers may be falling but mental health issues in general are growing. Often the GP is a patient’s first port of call when they cannot cope with stress at work or in the home.

“Yet in some areas GPs are being told in the first instance to refer patients to ‘approved’ self-help websites.

“To ask a patient to look up their mental health symptoms online is a seriously dangerous practice, because when someone is in a fragile state of mind they will identify with everything they read and this will just add to their stress.

“And why is this happening? It is happening because there are insufficient clinical resources available for referrals.

“Opening more helplines will not change this. We need more clinical resources, both in terms of consultation and treatment. It would be very interesting to know how many suicides have occurred following online ‘self-help’ referrals.”