Charities attack treatment delays for mental health patients Ministers urged to act quickly as survey finds 12% of people are forced to wait more than a year to be seen.
More than one in 10 people with mental health problems are waiting for longer than a year before receiving talking treatments and more than half are waiting longer than three months, mental health charities and practitioners have found.
The We Need to Talk Coalition said that delays and a lack of choice were having a devastating effect on people who were not getting the right treatment, while others were being driven to pay for private treatment.
It said the NHS should offer a full range of evidence-based psychological therapies to all who need them within 28 days of requesting a referral. Official figures published last month showed that more than 80,000 of the 241,250 patients referred by GPs and other clinicians to talking therapies in the second quarter of this year waited more than 28 days to receive treatment.
Paul Farmer, chief executive of the mental health charity Mind, which is part of the coalition, said government investment in the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) programme had helped millions with some improvement in waiting times but that more needed to be done.
"It is far from acceptable that in some parts of the country people are still waiting over a year to access treatment," he said. "This must urgently be addressed if the government's commitment to parity between physical and mental health care is to be realised.
"We're urging the government and NHS England to take heed of this new report and make sure that people with mental health problems are getting the right treatment when they need it."
Almost a fifth of adults in the UK experience anxiety or depression, according to official figures, and it costs the economy £7.5m, the majority through lost employment.
The We Need to Talk coalition questioned more than 1,600 people who have tried to access talking therapies such as counselling and cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) on the NHS in England over the last two years. In response, 12% said they waited more than 12 months and 54% more than three months.
The government has for the first time asked NHS England in its mandate to set out standard waiting time and access standards for mental health services. But the standards, currently being drawn up, will not come into effect until 2015, which Mind says is too late, necessitating "another long wait for people who desperately need support".
We Need to Talk's concerns extend to the range of services available. CBT is the most commonly prescribed treatment but it is not suitable for everyone and 58% of people said they were not offered a choice in the type of therapy they received. One in 10 said that they faced costs for private treatment because the therapy needed was not available on the NHS.
Health minister Norman Lamb said that IAPT was a victim of its own success. "More people than ever before are getting access to talking therapies thanks to our £450m investment in the IPAT programme," he said. "Due to its initial success, demand has increased and this has led to increased waiting times in some parts of the country."
James Morris, chair of the all party parliamentary Group on mental health, said he fully supported reducing the waiting time to 28 days as soon as possible and increasing the range of therapies on offer: "There's been considerable progress made but there are still differences between the way physical and mental health services are treated in the NHS," he said.
Case study:
Lisa, 51, from Stratford Upon-Avon, was born in Zimbabwe but moved to the UK in 1994 when she was deported because she was transgender, having been imprisoned for six weeks and given electric shock treatment, she said.
She had a sex change in 2000 but continued to suffer from the depression she said had plagued her since childhood. She was medicated and did art therapy before, four years ago, a psychiatrist suggested she should have psychotherapy or CBT. However, Lisa waited for 18 months to have an initial interview and another 18 months for treatment to start, eventually, in November last year. She pointed out that even when you get treatment the waiting to feel better goes on as the impact is not immediate. It is only in the last two months that it has begun to work, she said.
"If I had this sooner, maybe I would have been confident enough to let somebody into my life rather than be afraid of everything and everyone," she said. "The talking has helped me understand why I am who I am. Before I was lost."
Even though she is now getting treatment, it is in Leamington Spa, meaning she has a hour journey each way, which she said can be difficult after a gruelling session. "Sometimes I get out of the place and I am suicidal," she said. The Guardian
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