How common are mental health problems?
The mental health system in England
Mental health and social deprivation
Mental health and culture
Mental health and crime

How common are mental health problems?

Research suggests that about one in four people experience mental distress at any one time.

The most common problems are anxiety and depression. One in a hundred people are diagnosed with schizophrenia. Approximately five per cent of people 65 and over, and twenty per cent of people over 80 years old, will develop dementia with the most common form being Alzheimer's Disease.

About 630,000 adults are in contact with specialist mental health services in England and over 95 per cent of people in touch with services live in the community.

More women than men experience mental distress: about one in four women and more than one in ten men seek help for depression though the number of men who experience mental ill health is increasing. Men are three times more likely than women to have alcohol dependence and twice as likely to be dependent on drugs.

Eating disorders are becoming increasingly common, especially in larger cities. Bulimia, for example, currently affects about three out of every one hundred women.

More than one in five adolescents think so little of themselves that life does not seem worth living. One in five deaths of young people are suicide.

The mental health system in England

4 Directorates of Health and Social Care

6 NIMHE national programmes

8 NIMHE development centres

28 Strategic Health Authorities

302 Primary Care Groups and Trusts

74 secondary Mental Health Trusts (also sometimes called specialist Mental Health Trusts)

127 Local Implementation Teams (or LITs) coordinating their locality's plans and acting as a driver for change in mental health services

80,000 staff work in statutory mental health services

22 (including 4 in Wales) prisons have begun during 2001/02 developing mental health in-reach services and a further 26 will begin development during 2002/03

Mental health and social deprivation

17% of population are estimated to be below the poverty line.

One in ten children have some kind of mental health problem in which poverty is a major factor. Children in families where the head of the household has never worked before are more than twice as likely to have mental health needs than the national average. Children in the poorest households are three times more likely to have mental health problems than children in well off households.

Four times as many people are diagnosed with schizophrenia in inner city areas than other parts of the country.

Over a third of people sleeping rough have some form of mental health problem.

Eighty per cent of people with serious mental health needs are unemployed, accounting for almost £8 billion every year in direct benefits' payments.

Mental health and culture

It is estimated that 6 per cent of the population in Britain do not classify themselves as white and are assumed to belong to minority ethnic groups. This amounts to nearly 3 million people. In addition, 1.5% of the British population are identified as born in Ireland. Estimates based on the 1991 census suggest that the total number of people of Irish descent as between 1.7 and 1.95 million, constituting 3.5% of the population.

African and Caribbean people are twice as likely as white people to be diagnosed with a mental health problem and three to five times more likely to be admitted to hospital with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

In the past, there has been a preoccupation to explain the cultural roots of this phenomenon; now it seems professionals, researchers and others are prepared to consider the context and psychosocial determinants of mental health problems experienced by people from minority ethnic communities.

Mental health and crime

About one in five people involved in criminal activity are estimated to have a psychiatric disorder.

In a recent study, 10 per cent of prisoners had a diagnosis of serious mental health needs, such as schizophrenia. In total, about 90 per cent of prisoners has a drug or alcohol misuse problem, personality disorder, common mental health problem (like anxiety or depression) or serious mental health problem.

Most crimes involving people diagnosed with a mental illness are minor and violent crimes are uncommon.