A variety of patients are admitted to dedicated inpatient wards every week suffering from a range of mental illness — severe depression, schizophrenia, psychoses.

Very often it’s someone with a history of drink or drug abuse but also we see young people who have maybe gone on a Gap Year, experimented with substances, and developed a mental health problem.

For many families this is a distressing and disturbing experience.

I’ve been practising psychiatrist for 25 years and when I started working a lot of mental health wards were still housed in crumbling Victorian buildings, where patients would come in and not have access to their own room, or any quiet and peaceful space. That is what some really need in order to recover.

Even today, there is still a wide variation between the ideal conditions and places where things are not going according to plan — sometimes the only facilities are lockable rooms for safety and custody, and somewhere to keep medications, and that’s it.

In a good service it’s a modern, purpose-built building, with good facilities - patients get their own room with en suite bathrooms.

It is not as easy as it seems to prevent patients absconding — most people who are in hospital are admitted for a period of 24 to 28 days and that’s a long time if you do not have leave to go out for walks. There is a balance that needs to be struck between keeping patients active and content while also maintaining rigorous safety.

Many patients worry about what is happening at work or at home while they are being treated. Many do not wish to tell their employers that they are suffering from a mental illness or they may simply worry about who is looking after their children or pets.

Services suffer when trusts rely to a large extent on agency nurses to cover shifts and lack full-time staff who feel part of the community and want to make a difference there.

On one level there is a societal problem — we need more affordable homes for key workers in problem areas so that more can be encouraged to stay and really involve themselves in their roles.

There is also a crucial lack of mental health specialists available in GP surgeries, where 90 per cent of mental health consultations take place.

If we were talking about diabetes, this would already be an outrage, but despite being the most-common long-term health condition that affects adults in this country, mental health is still relegated to the status of a ‘Cinderella’ service.

Dr Geraldine Strathdee, OBE, is a consultant psychiatrist and clinical director at Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust, South London

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