Parliament Campaign

Access to innovative mental health treatments for mood disorders

We are in a period of great excitement and optimism regarding the treatment of mood disorders with many new advances having been made over the last 10-15 years, with further developments potentially on the horizon. These advances include:

  • Newer forms of psychotherapy more tailored to some of the specific difficulties people with mood disorders experience.
  • Drugs with different mechanisms of action which may be more effective and/or better tolerated than conventional antidepressants for some people.
  • A range of “neurostimulatory” treatments from those that can be used easily and safely in the home to those that are surgically implanted to give long lasting benefit.

Access to such treatments can mean relief from profound suffering for patients; reduce enormous personal burden for families and carers; reduce lost productivity due to illness; and decrease the substantial NHS costs of repeated and prolonged clinical care for those suffering from mood disorders.

However, despite many of these evidence-based treatments being used widely in many other countries around the world, the situation in the UK NHS is less rosy. Many of these newer treatment are either only available in a few centres around the country, or they are not available at all.

To illustrate this, in the last 15 years there has been only one new antidepressant made available to patients in the NHS. In the same period of time, there have been 10 new medications in the USA.


        We are wanting to challenge this!

        We are leading a campaign to get the Government and the Department of Health and Social Care to address the barriers to these new treatments, making them more widely available, providing hope to patients and reducing the burden of mood disorders to individuals, their families and society more widely.

        We have asked some of the nation’s Leading Clinicians & some of the National Mental Health Charities to sign an Open Letter to the government about the lack of access to innovative mental health treatments: Open Letter


        Please help us with our campaign!

        Persuading the government to act:

        • We have raised the issue of lack of access with the Government, which has declined to go beyond pointing to existing arrangements for making treatments available: Government Reply Letter. This is not at all helpful since these existing arrangements have failed spectacularly to date.
        • To encourage our governing institutions to address the issue, Tim Farron MP, has laid down an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons on the lack of access to these treatments. The government will be persuaded to address the issue if sufficient MPs sign the Early Day Motion. We are aiming for 150-200 MPs signing the Motion.


        How you can help us!

        There are THREE things which you can do:

        1. Contact your MP asking them to sign the Early Day Motion

        MPs will be persuaded to sign the Motion if they are asked by their constituents to sign it. If you would like to support the campaign to persuade the government to make clinically effective and safe, innovative treatments, please would you:

        • Read this brief document which explains how you can help make this campaign successful Instructions for Contacting MPs
        • Email your MP. Here is a link to a draft email which you could use - you can personalise it, if you wish Draft Email

        This email includes two personal stories of how the innovative treatments have helped people: Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) TMS Personal Story and transcranial-Direct Current Stimulation (t-DCS) TDCS Personal Story

        2. Sign the 38 degrees petition on lack of access to innovative treatments
        • Here is a link to the petition: Petition Link
        • The more people who sign the petition the greater the pressure there will be on the government to respond and address the issue of lack of access.
        3. Where ever possible, encourage family, friends and colleagues to also write to their MP and sign the 38 degree petition.


        See below examples of innovative treatments:

        The innovative treatments cover neurostimulation, medication and psychological interventions. For example:
        • Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), a NICE approved, non-invasive neurostimulation technique that has produced meaningful outcomes for patients with difficult to treat depression. A recent research study demonstrated that it can be cost saving to the NHS. However, currently less than one in five mental health NHS Trusts provide the treatment.
        • The antidepressant bupropion. This is a licensed, and one of the more commonly used, antidepressants across many parts of the world including the USA and Europe. Its importance is that it has a very different side effect profile than commonly used antidepressants (SSRIs) and impacts different depressive symptoms. This makes it a good alternative for people who are unable to tolerate, or whose depression does not respond to, an SSRI. However, in the UK it does not have a license and is rarely offered to patients.
        • Group psychoeducation for bipolar disorder. This form of psychotherapy was developed several years ago. The evidence shows that people how receive it experience fewer relapses of their illness and are less likely to be admitted to hospital. However, while elements of the therapy are used on occasions, the full treatment, which is what has been shown to be effective, is rarely made available to patients in the NHS.