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Armed Forces Personnel

My hon. Friend is absolutely right in his specific point, but there is also a generic point that applies to our society as a whole. Our society, in common with a number of Anglo-Saxon societies, does not deal with mental health issues appropriately. There is too much stigma attached to mental health issues—something that does not apply to any other illness of any other type. That encourages late presentation of illness and, consequently, our outcomes are poorer. There is a particular problem in the case of those who have served in the armed forces, who are often reluctant to seek psychiatric help from a general practitioner or a civilian psychiatrist because they believe that those people will not understand the originating trauma that they have been through. We need to look at a co-ordinated way of improving all our mental health services. That is the last great public service reform that needs to be carried out in this country. We need to look at how we treat our armed forces in developing further the psychiatric services in the military. There will always be a culture gap; those who have been in the armed forces will always be suspicious of how well those in civilian services understand their problems. Perhaps the only way to deal with that is to recognise that we must have yet another expansion of military psychiatric services, as well as of civilian ones. We need to deal with that as a country. I honestly do not believe that this is a party political issue. It is a cultural, deeply ingrained issue which we need to deal with in a much more open and sympathetic way.