The hidden injustice of mental illness is something that Tories really care about, claims the woman who heads a party that has cut mental health provisioning back so far you can see its bone marrow.
“Every great leader likes to make a big speech with the word society in it so a memorable sound-bite will be created,” said the unelected head of government, “I want a sharing society. As long as it’s not money we’re sharing obviously!”
A quarter of the adult population at any given time will be suffering from some kind of mental health problem, say statistics that the conservative party ignored over the last six years as they stripped funding for mental health care for adults and children.
Apparently that can all be forgotten now as it’s time to transform attitudes. And use buzzwords.
“What we need to do, rather than funding services and professionals to help like any civilised society,” explained homeopathy loving quack sucker Jeremy ‘the’ Hunt, “is to change people’s perceptions of mental health. Too long has there been a stigma around nutters and if it doesn’t involve treasury funding then we really want to change that. Anyway, I’ve juggled the figures so I can claim we’re spending more on it now because we’re cutting less than we were two years ago.”
A number of actions are being taken, including training people how to not spend money on the problem and community solutions instead of wasting money signposting people to professional, qualified and expensive NHS services.
Liberal Democrats have pointed out that this was all stuff they were supposed to do years ago under the coalition but nobody could quite remember who the Liberal Democrats were.
“Does anybody want to hear my opinion?” asked an ordinary person with mental health issues as everybody pretended not to notice them.
“What we want,” insisted May’s team, “Is parity of esteem for mental and physical health.”
We asked: Does that mean that something will be done to fix the issue that mental health issues are a quarter of the health problems of the nation but it gets less than ten per cent of the funding?
“No, but we will make some more speeches about it being important and all that.”
