Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I’d like to thank Plaid Cymru for bringing forward this debate today. The issues that you raise in your motion have been touched upon quite a lot, actually, in the Assembly in the past few weeks. But I think, like you, that it is very important to focus upon the stigma that is attached to mental health conditions, as this can affect a person for the rest of their life.

As you said, one in four of us will suffer from some form of mental health issue, whether it’s depression, which is the vast majority, anxiety, dementia, perinatal depression or psychotic illnesses. Because it affects so many of us, we have to wonder why we make it so difficult for those with mental health issues to believe that they are as valuable to society as anyone else. For example, if you look at the evidence for those who’ve had psychotic illnesses, it is clear that one in three will only have one episode, and yet, once in the system, it can be very difficult for them to break the cycle, move forward, learn to cope with their illness and get back into education or the workplace. Stigma, and fear of stigma, is shown to play a large role in this inability to reintegrate. Another third will manage with medications, and, again, the same stands true of that statistic—stigma, and fear of stigma, has made it very difficult to go back into the workplace. If you look at the people who are out of work with mental health—these days, they tend to be people in their 40s, 50s and 60s—at a time when the world was even tougher on people with mental health issues than it is today.

The people I speak to about their mental health issues talk about what I’ve termed ‘the whiff of disapproval’. Young teens have told me that people are appalled that they are self-harming, their families don’t understand them or they think that they just need to get a hold of themselves, if they are struggling with eating disorders. Sometimes, a person with mental health issues might—and I do stress the word ‘might’—turn to alcohol or drugs to cope. Most homeless people, those on the street, suffer from an underlying mental health issue and, to be frank, people don’t approve of the homeless—the homeless wino loitering around the supermarket entrance—but what they don’t see is there is a person who’s lost everything, and, usually, the root cause is a lack of support or early diagnosis of a mental health condition. Maybe this is the issue, because a broken limb is easy to notice, chronic conditions are accepted, people with cancer or heart problems are relatively easy to identify and support or have sympathy for, but mental health—unseen, unknowable, often misinterpreted.

Each year in Wales, between 300 and 350 people die from suicide, and the latest figures show that this is the leading cause of death for 20 to 34-year-olds. People with a diagnosed mental health condition are at particular risk, with an estimated 90 per cent of people who attempt to die or who do die by suicide having one or more mental health conditions. Suicide attempts, drugs, alcohol—these are the areas where society doesn’t really approve, but we just don’t look beyond to see the cause, and that reinforces the pejorative stigma that a person who owns to a mental health issue can often feel; that faint whiff of disapproval.

Educating young people will go a long way to combating this. We already have better acceptance of physical disabilities and children are learning about personal health and environmental issues, because schools focus on these streams. We would like to see work being commissioned, Cabinet Secretary, on the best way of giving young children an understanding of mental health issues. In secondary school, this is even more important because of the extraordinary stresses our young people are under.

Turning to another part of your motion, educating employers, whether private or public employers, and particularly educating those services that interface with members of the public to ensure a parity of respect and access to those with mental health issues, is vital. I think the Time to Change campaign has done an awful lot to go towards that, and it was a great pleasure on Monday of this week to meet some campaigners from the Time to Change campaign, who came around with their assistant dog and talked to us about these issues.

So, the Welsh Conservatives have nothing to quarrel with Plaid Cymru on their motion, except for seven words:

‘and to seek powers over employment law.’

I was saddened to see this nationalist thrust on the agenda, because this is an agenda that does not usually divide us. So, we have amended—and I move the amendment tabled in the name of Paul Davies—and if our amendment falls, we will support the Government amendment, which is unfortunate, because, in any other respect, we are totally in tune with this motion, and I do thank you for bringing it forward.