A Dundee dad has been left heartbroken after his teenage son took his own life.
Paul Kinsella said he was upset and angry following the death of his son, Dylan, 17, on Friday night.
The former Morgan Academy pupil had battled with issues around drugs and mental health but his problems were not always taken seriously by the NHS, said his father.
Mr Kinsella, 43, said: “At the moment, it’s obviously very upsetting, obviously heart-breaking, but I’m furious – I’m angry as well.
“And it’s still not hit me fully yet, I know that.
“He was great, everyone loved him, he was just a happy laddie.
“That’s shown by the fact that all these people on Facebook and all these old pals, ones I remember and ones I don’t remember as well, are all saying things they did with Dylan.
“One thing they all say is that he was always there to listen to them.”
Dylan, a former Dundee College student, had received treatment at the Carseview mental health unit at Ninewells, said his dad, who stays in the Hilltown area of the city.
However, Mr Kinsella, of Dallfield Court, said he faced long delays in trying to get the help he needed.
He added: “He (Dylan) had been at Carseview and they were seeing him for a few weeks, but there was one time when he went up and he was hardly able to stand from the amount of drugs he had taken and they said ‘we don’t believe you’ and sent him home.
“When he phoned them after that it was always ‘we don’t believe you’ or ‘we’ll get you a counsellor’ but it was eight months wait.
“If somebody is suicidal, waiting eight months just doesn’t make sense to me.”
The grieving father is now asking NHS mental health services take reports of poor mental health in young people more seriously and for additional funding to be made available.
He said: “They need to stop just putting it down to teenagers and just saying it’s them wanting attention.
“If they’re wanting attention they’re wanting attention for a reason – listen to them.
“It just feels like going through the motions because there’s not enough counsellors to treat the amount of people they need to help.
“They need to get more money into it.”
Mr Kinsella said he was grateful to everyone who had come forward to pay tribute to Dylan, adding: “Everybody’s been offering their help, even the parents of Dylan’s friends who I’d never met, because it’s the one thing you’re never meant to do, isn’t it? You’re not meant to bury your own son.”
In particular he said he wanted to thank Peter Donnet Junior, a friend of Dylan, who has set up a Gofundme page to pay for his funeral.
A spokesperson for NHS Tayside said its thoughts were with Mr Kinsella’s family but patient confidentiality meant it was unable to comment on matters relating to individual patients.
However, the spokesperson added: “The Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) in Tayside is currently meeting the 18 week National Waiting Times target for Mental Health and is developing measures to continually improve waiting times. The service remains committed to making further improvements to ensure all children and young people receive the best quality care without delays.
“The Tayside Mental Health Strategy ‘Living Life well’ demonstrates NHS Tayside’s commitment to improving mental health and wellbeing services for children and young people in Tayside, ensuring care is tailored to the needs of each individual patient.
“One of the projects being taken forward is developing a pathway for young people to support them in the transition between mental health services for children and young people and adult services.
“People living in Dundee have access to a wide range of mental health support, including psychological therapies for adults and young people. Due to high demand for the service and recruitment challenges, the current waiting time for the Adult Psychological Therapy Service is approximately 40 weeks. The service is working with the Scottish Government to improve waiting times.”
The number of children and adolescents waiting to see a mental health specialist has reached record numbers, new figures show.
At the end of December, there were 10,820 young people waiting to start treatment at CAMHS.
This compares with 9,337 during the same period in 2018 and a low of 7,620 in December 2017.
The official stats show that two-thirds of children were seen within 18 weeks, well below the 90% target.
The Scottish government standard states children and young people should start treatment within 18 weeks of referral to CAMHS.
In the last three months of last year only NHS Borders, NHS Orkney and NHS Western Isles met the standard, with NHS Lothian seeing less than half within the allotted timeframe.
The statistics show 272 children and young people who were seen during the final quarter of 2019 had waited over a year.
A further 589 children who were still waiting at the end of December had already been waiting over a year.
There were 3,884 children and young people starting treatment in the final quarter of 2019, a 14.1% decrease from the same quarter in 2018.
There are now more than 30,000 open cases in CAMHS.
Mental health problems
The Scottish Children’s Services Coalition said the waiting time figures highlighted the “desperate need” for increased investment.
A spokesman said: “The simple fact is that we are continuing to fail thousands of children and young people with mental health problems, and more clearly needs to be done to address this epidemic.”
Mental Health Minister Clare Haughey said the Scottish government was creating new CAMHS posts as well as strengthening the support available in communities and schools.
She said: “This year’s Programme for Government builds on this progress even further.”
That includes community wellbeing services for children and young people and a new 24/7 crisis support service, Ms Haughey said.
Scottish Labour’s Mary Fee said: “At a time when youth suicides have been increasing these figures should shame SNP ministers into action.”
Scottish Liberal Democrat health spokesman Alex Cole-Hamilton said: “Problems that start small are becoming crises as help arrives too late.”
He called for a mental health practitioner in every GP practice and new 24 hours a day service in A&E.
Fears have been raised over the welfare of vulnerable young people in Angus after new figures revealed more than a thousand under 18s have been forced to wait longer than three months for mental health treatment.
More than 2,157 young people in the county have been referred for mental health conditions since 2016, with 1,053 waiting longer than 12 weeks to receive care for a range of potentially life-threatening conditions such as a depression, eating disorders and anxiety.
Fewer than one in five of the Angus patients were treated inside the county, with more than 1,637 of the young patients asked to travel to other parts of Tayside for treatment.
The figures, released after a Freedom of Information request, do not include data for 2019, meaning the total is likely to be higher.
Kirstene Hair, Conservative MP for Angus, said the figures highlighted the “failings” in mental health treatment for young people locally.
Ms Hair has campaigned on improving treatment for eating disorders and other mental health issues.
She said: “These figures expose the failings in mental health treatment for young people here in Angus.
“The families affected are very often waiting for months on end for treatment, while patients routinely have to travel outside of Angus to get the help they need.
“It is not good enough. Waiting times must be addressed urgently if these young people are to get the immediate support and treatment they need,” she added.
The national target waiting time for treatment to begin is 18 weeks. Separate figures recently published by the Scottish Government for the first quarter of 2019 show only 57.9% of young NHS Tayside patients started treatment within that window. The national standard is 90%.
The Angus statistics, however, show some improvement locally. A total of 383 young people waited more than 12 weeks in 2016, 403 in 2017 and 267 in 2018.
Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMHS) clinics are available in three locations in Angus: Whitehills Health and Community Care Centre in Forfar, Carnoustie Health Centre and Links Health Centre, Montrose.
Children and young people in Angus who need specialist care are assessed and treated in the main Child Health Outpatient unit at Dudhope Terrace in Dundee.
An NHS Tayside spokeswoman said: “There has been a lot of work undertaken by staff to improve access to services for young people in Tayside over the past 12 months.
“We have been working closely with a Healthcare Improvement Scotland team to deliver an improvement plan which will reduce waiting times. This includes a full CAMHS service workforce review and recruitment drive to key posts, to ensure that the team are fully equipped to manage the service demand and enhance the experience for children and their families.
“We are determined to continue making improvements to ensure all our children and young people receive the best quality care without delays and we hope to reach the national standard in the near future,” she added.
“Trying to be there at appointments and making sure they’re getting the help they need can be really valuable.
“Try to be there for them as much as possible to help them feel a little bit less alone,” says Laura.
“Remember that you are not invincible so they will need to access professional support. Encouraging them to see a GP would be a great stepping stone into the services.”
Laura now has a psychology degree and has recently qualified as a mental health nurse.
She adds: “I think it’s crucial for people who are struggling with mental illness to realise it’s not their fault and a massive way of achieving this is for their friends to stay in contact.
“Don’t change the way you interact with them too much,” she says.
Young Minds is one of the charities which offers advice if you’re unhappy with the standard of the mental health treatment you’re getting.
For help and support on mental health visit the BBC Advice pages.
Mental health services for children and young people are under pressure.
IT was heartening to see one of the first actions of the new Scottish Government Health Secretary, Jeane Freeman, being to recognise as “completely unacceptable” the fact that one in five children and young people seeking mental health treatment are having this rejected.
As an organisation that campaigns to improve mental health services, we have previously expressed our concerns over the increased demand on child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) and that fact that such a high number of these children and young people who are referred for treatment have it rejected, often with no explanation or with no alternative support provided. This leaves many thousands of vulnerable children and young people in a state of limbo.
An audit commissioned by the Scottish Association for Mental Health (SAMH) and NHS Information Services Division was undertaken on behalf of the Scottish Government to review this situation. What is clear from the recently published report is that for many of these young people their needs are not viewed as being severe enough to warrant CAMHS; however appropriate alternative support is lacking.
Many children, young people and their families highlighted that they have received a rejection letter within a very short timescale, and feel angry, aggrieved, cheated and let down due to a feeling that no proper assessment process has been undertaken.
More disturbingly, it appears that some clearly require treatment but this is being rejected, often without any face-to-face meeting with a specialist. In fact, only 31 per cent of those who undertook an online survey got a face-to-face assessment, and the majority were rejected on the basis of a written referral.
It was disturbing to read the harrowing first-hand accounts of the experiences of young people and their families. This includes some believing that they would not be seen unless they were suicidal or at risk of harm, and the impact that failure to get good enough treatment has on mental health, often with the situation for them worsening and then entering a crisis situation. There was evidence also of those who were self-harming, but whose condition was not deemed severe enough to warrant treatment. Situations such as this are wholly unacceptable.
It is pleasing to see the Cabinet Secretary fully accepting the 29 recommendations outlined in the report on these rejected referrals and create a new CAMHS Taskforce, headed by mental health expert, Dr Dame Denise Coia, backed with £5 million of investment to reshape and improve CAMHS.
One of the key recommendations in the report was the requirement for increased investment in CAMHS and the provision of alternative support services, for those who may not require CAMHS, with mandatory signposting to these. And yet we have seen cuts to these support services over the years. If we are to deliver the support these children and young people need we need greater investment not only in CAMHS, but in such alternative services.
It was heartening to also note the desire for a nationwide provision of schools-based services recognised. Investing a fraction of the mental health budget on school-based counselling services, for example, helps to keep children in school and avoid unnecessary and often stigmatising mental health diagnoses.
Issues around mental health represent one of the greatest public health challenges of our time and we urge the new Cabinet Secretary to put mental health at the very heart of the Scottish Government health agenda, providing the high quality mental health support that our children and young people deserve.
The incoming health secretary has set up a £5m taskforce to reshape and improve child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS).
Jeane Freeman condemned the existing system for referring children and young people for specialist mental health treatment.
The announcement follows publication of a report on “rejected referrals”.
An audit was announced last year after NHS figures showed thousands of referrals were being rejected.
A rejected referral occurs when CAMHS is assessed as inappropriate for the child or young person.
During the audit period in February, one in five referrals was rejected across all health boards.
It was found that decisions usually happened quickly, with most made on the basis of paper referrals rather than face-to-face assessments.
Further research gathered from seven health boards found two-thirds of their 285 rejected referrals included “signposting” to other services.
‘Unhelpful’
However there was a disparity between this and the views of children, young people and their families.
Of the 253 people who participated in an online survey of their experiences, only 42% felt they were signposted.
Meanwhile some reported signposting was “generic, unhelpful and often points to resources they have already explored”.
Some young people whose referral has been rejected reported a belief that they will not be seen by CAMHS unless they are suicidal or at immediate risk of harm.
The report recommended further research into the CAMHS system as a whole, work to close the gap in provision where it is not the most appropriate service, immediate changes to its assessment procedures, and ongoing data collection around rejected referrals.
Ms Freeman said: “Demand on mental health services is growing but far too many young people are being turned away from help or waiting too long to be seen.
“This report finds that, while CAMHS may not be the right path for some of those referred, young people are being rejected from treatment without proper explanation or being directed to more appropriate care.
“That is completely unacceptable.
“I am accepting the recommendations in this report and I am determined that our mental health service will be re-founded on the need to empathise, engage and explain how to get help to often very vulnerable young people.”
Mental health expert Dr Dame Denise Coia has been appointed to lead the taskforce, with initial recommendations for action expected over the summer.