• THE BBC carried an awful news bulletin regarding massive increase in deaths / suicides associated with students at universities. The ages of these unfortunate people were not stated.

Children’s mental health services have been heavily and publicly criticised as not sufficient or suitable enough for young people.

The comment on the BBC was that maybe these children, once they were 18, would be under adult mental health service provision, and this is in an even more dire state, being starved of appropriate funding. This is now being partly blamed for these suicides.

Camden borough has had the highest amount of long-term serious mental illness in any area in the whole of Europe. This is an awful indictment of the Camden Clinical Commis­sion­ing Group which has stripped the borough of nearly all suitable acute and community service provision.

The CCCG were formed to improve and increase mental health service provision but, in reality, they have drastic­ally reduced it by dumbing-down services or closing them, and drastically cutting funding of all mental health services.

Since 2012 they have been starving Peter to pay Paul. As the government cut the CCCG funding so the CCCG cut the mental health funding accordingly.

May 14 to 20 marks Mental Health Awareness Week. What has Camden Council or CCCG positively done to deal with the massively increasing numbers of chronically long-term seriously mentally ill of Camden borough? Neither the council nor the CCCG will accept there is any problem. It’s like: “crisis what crisis?”

Camden & Islington NHS Foundation Trust have totally failed residents of both boroughs. But in my opinion it’s all down to the draconian clinical commissioning teams of both boroughs who have starved the trust of the required funding.

To keep “physical health” funding up to a reasonable level, they have been using funding desper­ately needed for mental health.

There is a crisis in Camden and Islington which is now blatantly noticeable on the streets with these unfortunate long-term mentally ill individuals, suffering and alone, in every café, on a bench, or lying on the floor, or in prison.

God help us, as Camden and Islington councils and the clinical commissioning group will not.

TONY FISHER
Long-Term Patient, Camden