Last week was National Mental Health Awareness Week – an annual event organised by the Mental Health Foundation that shines a light on different aspects of our mental wellbeing. The focus for 2022 is loneliness – a good choice given the impact of Covid-19 over the past couple of years.
The scale of the problem cannot be underestimated. Up to a fifth of all UK adults feel lonely most or all of the time, and research suggests that loneliness can be as bad for our health as obesity or smoking. 200,000 older people have not had a conversation with a friend or relative in more than a month and this level of isolation is linked to a range of damaging health problems, such as heart disease, strokes and Alzheimer’s. It can also trigger or worsen substance abuse problems, with loneliness often fuelling addiction, which in turn damages relationships and leads to more loneliness.
This devastating spiral was discussed when I visited Gilead Foundations Women’s Centre in Jacobstowe, just north of Okehampton, last week. The charity provides supported living for women who have experienced various life-controlling issues, including drugs and alcohol addiction. The foundation is run by Lois Samuel, who in recent years has been elected to both West Devon Borough Council and Devon County Council. It is vital to have councillors from different backgrounds and I know Lois has been using her experiences to better inform policy decisions on local health and wellbeing services.
We spoke about what action has been taken in recent years to tackle loneliness (Theresa May became the first PM to launch a major cross-Government strategy in 2018) and what more needs to be done. Successes include ‘social prescribing’, where GPs help lonely patients get involved with community groups and activities instead of defaulting to medicine, and a greater focus on loneliness as part of relationship education in schools. One area where further action is needed is rural broadband – an issue I have championed in Westminster for many years. While coverage has improved in much of Central Devon since 2010, some of the most rural properties still don’t have access to decent speeds. Greater investment in these areas will boost our rural economy and help more people stay connected to family and friends.
Better access to public transport helps too, and I visited Okehampton this week to promote the Dartmoor Line’s new hourly service (up from one train every two hours since it launched in November). The Dartmoor Line really is achieving everything I hoped it would – it is providing a valuable service to local residents, it is taking cars off the A30 (cutting carbon emissions and reducing traffic into Exeter) and is improving access to training and job opportunities for a generation of young people. I am now fighting hard for a new station on the eastern edge of town to build on this success and have again been in contact this week with Rail Minister Wendy Morton about this.