5. Debate on the Children, Young People and Education Committee Report: 'Mind over matter: two years on'

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:42 pm on 16 December 2020.

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Photo of Rhun ap Iorwerth Rhun ap Iorwerth Plaid Cymru 4:42, 16 December 2020

Of course, there is some provision—school counselling, for example. The development of mental health in the new curriculum is ongoing too. But that transition between youth and adult services, the major gaps in services, the constant gate-keeping of people being told that they are not ill enough, remain major problems that have to be addressed.

That's why Plaid Cymru has proposed creating youth one-stop shops, which we're basing on a model that seems to be working very well in New Zealand. Within New Zealand's youth one-stop shops, several services are offered by physicians, by nurses, counsellors, social workers, youth staff, providing primary care, sexual and reproductive health support, mental health support, drug and alcohol services, counselling, smoking cessation, family planning, health promotion, education services—a whole raft of services. In other words, they treat and help the individual that they work with. They don't pathologise or medicalise the individual. They're based on a social model of mental health.

Now, we'd want to establish hubs to provide these comprehensive youth-focused services, including mental health services, in a single community-based setting, and 'youth' would be defined to include both adolescents and young adults, but, crucially—and I think that this is very, very important—nobody would be turned away because they don't quite meet some arbitrary age that would mean some people being turned away when they clearly need support. We'd aim to provide specific mental health services to young people who, as I say, aren't ill enough to require advanced psychiatric treatment, for example, but do certainly require support. But they can offer other services to treat the whole person in an age-appropriate manner. There could, for example, be the opportunity to co-locate other services around employment and specialist education and so on in these areas.

We've worked out the budget that we believe needs to be set aside to do this. We'll commit to doing that, and we're pleased to be facing questions on the finances; it's really important to look at the finances of an initiative like this. But we really should be asking what the financial cost is of not getting this right. What is the cost of lifelong use of specialist mental health services because we didn't have the services in place to intervene early and to support early? I guarantee you that the cost will be substantially more if we don't invest in our young people right now.