Voters mustn't accept disastrous state of Scotland's mental health treatment for young people as normal
In Sweden, children and young people needing mental health care are often admitted within a day; in Scotland, they can wait more than a year
There was one Friday, not long after I was elected, which has shaped much of my attitude over the past few years, and to this election especially. We had just closed the office for the day, when a woman arrived so distressed we had to see her.
She told us that her child was suffering mental health issues so severe she was terrified they might hurt themselves. The family was living in constant fear, and while the medics recognised the child needed help urgently, there seemed no way of getting them seen. It would take months, at least.
Sadly, that has not been a rare experience for me over the past few years. An average of around a family a week will contact me desperate for help for a child who has been placed on an interminable waiting list.
We do what we can to help and support them and prod the authorities to act, but too often the parents are forced to watch, wait and worry as their cherished child’s health deteriorates. At the end of last year, there were more than 4,000 children on waiting lists in Scotland.
According to Scottish Government standard, 90 per cent of children and young people should start treatment within 18 weeks of referral to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). But a recent a freedom of information request to health boards by the Scottish Liberal Democrats found a terrifying picture.
They discovered that 108 children and young people who started their treatment between June and September 2025 had waited more than a year. A further 128 had been waiting more than a year and were still waiting to start treatment at the end of September 2025.
Across Scotland, children had waited four-and-a-half million days longer than that 18-week standard for CAMHS treatment since 2019. That cannot be acceptable in a modern democracy which claims to value its health service.
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If you look at other countries, Sweden has been identified internationally as an exemplar, you find a very different picture. With high rates of community-based provision but fewer beds for children and young people per head of the population, children often wait fewer than 24 hours to be admitted.
The Swedish system may be different but, if we are to solve our problems, we need to look at how they are able to achieve results that would be life-changing for so many families here. If we do not, we will continue to fail an entire generation.
A 16-year-old voting for the first time next month will have experienced nothing else but the SNP and the danger is that they think this sort of disastrous treatment is both normal and somehow acceptable. Good mental health services should not just be an aspiration. They should be a given.
Mental health should have at least the same priority and investment as physical health. But somehow it never seems to happen and, of all the failures of this past 20 years, that one is the one which I find most frustrating.
Just recently I met that Mum again and she told me that her child was now doing much better. I wish every family’s story could have a happy ending.
Christine Jardine is the Scottish Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West
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