Improving mental health should be a priority in this election | Alastair Campbell

Nick Clegg deserves praise for pushing the mental health agenda. The campaign against smoking shows the preventative approach politicians need to take

To be fair to Nick Clegg … you won’t find me saying these words too often, what with his broken promises and his propping up of one of the nastiest, most rightwing and incompetent Tory governments we have known. But – to be fair to Clegg – he has at least helped drive mental health and mental illness up the political agenda. He has been a consistent supporter of the Time to Change campaign. He made mental health the centrepiece of his conference speech, and the subject of his first major outing of the election campaign, with a Lib Dem manifesto commitment pledge of £3.5bn funding for mental health over the next parliament.

So Clegg has talked the talk, and that is a good thing. But over the course of this parliament, though we have made some progress in the anti-stigma campaign – if not enough to prevent some awful reporting of the Germanwings tragedy – on services I believe we have gone backwards. Indeed, there is a danger that politicians see improvement in attitudes as a substitute for the need for services when in fact improved awareness and understanding will lead to more reporting of mental health problems, and therefore the need for more not less resources within the NHS for mental health.

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