Untreated mental health issues for children and young people whilst on waiting lists cost public services an estimated £75m per year.
This report, commissioned by teenage mental health charity stem4, assesses the annual ongoing costs to the wider public sector from young people on waiting lists for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS).
stem4 is a charity that promotes positive mental health in teenagers and those who support them including their families and carers, education professionals, as well as school nurses and GPs through the provision of mental health education, resilience strategies and early intervention.
To calculate the potential costs, we follow a three-step approach. First, we take the average service costs per month for individuals on CAMHS waiting lists. Then we assess the average waiting period, and finally combine this with data on the number of people treated by CAMHS in 2018/19.
We find that:
While a shortage of good quality published evidence makes it impossible to be certain, we believe that our analysis is likely to be conservative. It demonstrates that decisions around the resourcing and prioritisation of children’s mental health services cannot be made in isolation from decisions in other key services – the knock-on consequences have the potential to be significant.