Mr. Paul Gilligan:

I will deal with the self-harm issue. I think there are a couple of factors at play here. Self-harm is driven by distress. There are many reasons young people are experiencing very high levels of distress. If you reflect on your own experience over the last three or four years, and then transfer that to young people who are only really emerging and beginning their lives, you will realise that they have had to put up with very serious restrictions and have not had the opportunities other young people would have had. There was a great deal of stress regarding whether their exams were going to happen, or how they would happen. Now with high levels of stress, we enter another year where there is talk of war and of environmental disasters. Young people are living in an environment of very high anxiety.

The second issue is that more of this is being disclosed, which is fantastic. In the past, we tended to brush it under the carpet. Self-harm was one of those things that were connected with the stigma around mental health. For that reason, it was hidden away, particularly with young people. Parental expectations and child expectations have gone up and that is a fantastic thing to say. Young people expect to live a mentally healthy life and their parents expect them to live that. More and more young people are presenting for help because they know they have a right to be given the opportunity to live mentally healthy lives. Self-harm is considered a risk factor but there are other risk factors involved as well that get priority. We have a problem with CAMHS. It is under-resourced and under-developed. It is not going to be fixed in the next five or six years because the staff are not there. The answer to all of this is to work in the schools and build preventative initiatives that focus on things like self-harm and those areas that are still regarded with a level of stigma. I think you will see massive outcomes if that is done.