Lord Speaker’s Lectures
23 April 2024SAPHNA were privileged to have been invited to the Lord Speakers Lecture, an evening with the US Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy in conversation with Baroness Kidron on the Global Mental Health Challenge.
Dr Murthy spoke of the children and young people’s mental health being seen as a public health emergency that required urgent action from policy makers. He spoke at length about the negative impact that social media and digital platforms were having on their mental health and the growing evidence to support this statement. He spoke about social media being an important driver of the mental health crisis and a need to adopt a safety-first approach to protect young people from harm. Dr Murthy spoke about how we support children and young people, how simply increasing the number of mental health professionals was not the answer. In the US, the number of counsellors in schools had increase 3-fold however the waiting lists hadn’t reduced. More needed to be done including focusing on promotion and prevention, taking whole school approaches, and addressing economic and social barriers.
Prior to the lecture SAPHNA attended a meeting with Luciana Berger, hosted by Baroness D’Souza in the House of Lords. SAPHNA was able to share their response to the Mental Health Review that Luciana is leading, alongside other Public Health Leaderships from the Association of Directors of Public Health, Faculty of Public Health, Royal Society of Public Health and the Royal Society of Medicine. The focus of the conversation was on public health responses, prevention, resilience and mental health for children and young people. We were able to present the Roundtable Report – A School Nurse for Every School to Luciana.
