In the middle of Mental Health Awareness Week, Dr Calum MacLeod of the Mental Health Foundation stresses the importance of preventative spending and changes to the benefit system…
This year’s Mental Health Awareness Week celebrates the pivotal roles that our communities of place and of interest play in protecting peoples’ mental health. Throughout the Highlands and Islands and elsewhere in Scotland, we see amazing organisations and groups bringing people together, offering support, and working to make their communities healthier and happier.
But we can’t rely only on the goodwill and efforts of these, often charitable, groups to secure public mental health.
With the next Scottish Parliament Election less than a year away, now is the time for Scotland’s political parties to commit to embedding the idea of prevention as a cornerstone of our rural and urban communities’ good mental health.
That’s a matter of social justice. Nowhere more so than in Scotland’s poorest communities, where poverty blights peoples’ mental health, leading to higher incidences of common mental disorders, substance-related disorders, and suicidal behaviour, interwoven with social stress, stigmatisation and trauma.
There’s no magic button to instantly reset that corrosive relationship between poverty and the poor mental health of people who experience it in their everyday lives. But that shouldn’t mask the urgent need to shift the policy dial towards a much more radically preventative approach to tackling the root causes of that relationship and its damaging effects on the mental health of our poorest communities.
The pressing need to engineer that shift towards a more preventative policy perspective in mental health, and the reasons underpinning it, have long been recognised.
Back in 2011, the Christie Commission warned of Scotland’s public services facing their most serious challenges since the inception of the welfare state and called for new public services duties with a presumption in favour of preventative action and tackling inequalities.
In 2018, the Parliament’s Health and Sport Committee’s report on Preventative Action and Public Health confirmed the ongoing absence of such a shift, noting ‘a lack of primary prevention, i.e. public health policies that tackle social determinants.’
Yet despite a broad political consensus on the need to move to a much more preventative focus in public mental health, the pace of progress remains glacially slow.
That needs to change.
Accelerating more preventative policy involves delivering on the current Scottish Government’s long-standing commitment to allocate 10 per cent of NHS frontline spend to mental health and one per cent to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in the first year of the new Parliament after the election in May 2026.
It also means investing in a cross-portfolio approach to preventative mental health expenditure in public services that is transparent and accountable, as recommended by Public Health Scotland in its submission to the Parliament’s Health, Social Care and Sport Committee regarding the latter’s pre-scrutiny of the 2025-26 Scottish Budget.
The Scottish Government has rightly described social security as an investment in Scotland’s people, its communities and its future. Mitigating the two-child benefit cap to help lift thousands of Scotland’s children out of poverty would be an immediate down-payment on that investment, simultaneously improving the mental health of households in receipt of enhanced benefits.
Bold and innovative policy thinking to safeguard the mental health of Scotland’s communities is required. The Mental Health Foundation is therefore calling for an ‘Improving Scotland’s Mental Health Fund’ of at least £20 million annually, for the duration of the next Parliament. The proposed new Fund – to be potentially underwritten by receipts from ScotWind offshore renewable energy leases – would complement the existing Communities Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund for Adults by providing a strategic focus on innovative preventative approaches for securing good mental health, with scope to leverage additional funds from a range of external sources.
More investment in community-based preventative mental health support is also needed. In Dundee, the Mental Health Foundation’s Together to Thrive programme provides exactly that type of support for parents of children with neurodevelopmental needs, taking pressure off CAMHS already experiencing intolerable strain due to high demand, by following a community task-sharing model. There’s no reason why such an approach can’t also be replicated in our rural communities, if there is the political will to deliver it.
Being part of a safe, positive and welcoming community is vital for everyone’s mental health and wellbeing. So, this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week theme of community is a celebration of the inspirational people and organisations doing fantastic work in our communities. It should also serve as a timely catalyst for Scotland’s political parties to committment to bold and ambitious cross-cutting preventative public mental health policy as we head towards the forthcoming Scottish Parliament Election.