Children still waiting more than 1,000 days for mental health treatment

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP has today said that his party is focused on delivering world class mental health services after he revealed shocking waits for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMHS) across many of Scotland’s health boards.

It comes as part of a wider investigation by the Scottish Liberal Democrats into the state of mental health services. 

Scottish Liberal Democrat freedom of information requests to health boards reveal that:

• In 2024/25, a patient in NHS Highland waited 1,189 days (more than 3 years) to start treatment
• In the same period, 284 patients in NHS Lothian waited more than two years to start treatment.
• Patients also waited more than a year to start treatment in NHS Ayrshire & Arran, NHS Borders, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, NHS Lanarkshire and NHS Lothian. This included a patient who waited 794 days (2 years and 1 month) in NHS Lanarkshire.
• In terms of current waits, a patient has been waiting 1,137 days to start treatment in NHS Tayside.
• The longest some patients are currently waiting to start treatment is also more than a year in NHS Borders, NHS Grampian, NHS Highland, NHS Lanarkshire, and NHS Lothian.

Alex Cole-Hamilton said:

“The SNP have spent the last two decades ignoring the scale of the mental health crisis. Their failures are plain to see in all those children waiting months and years for the treatment they need.

“Making children and young people wait years for help only worsens their mental health; it is a sure-fire way to add to their pain.

“Scottish Liberal Democrats are the party of mental health. We want to drive down waiting times by installing more counsellors in schools and rolling out more specialists in GP surgeries and A&E departments near to you. We’d fund that by increasing the tax paid by the social media giants who cause so much of the problem.

“Scotland needs world class mental health services in every corner of the country. Next May, you can vote for those by marking a cross next to the Scottish Liberal Democrats on the peach regional ballot paper.”