ON WORLD Mental Health Day we should recognise the daily struggle faced by millions of people with mental illness globally.

We should also demand greater recognition of mental illness, and to campaign for decent services and treatment.

Nearly nine out of 10 people who experience mental illness say they face stigma and discrimination as a result and this can be even worse than the symptoms themselves. It may mean that people are reluctant to come forward to get the help that they need. They often feel unable to talk about mental illness in the workplace for fear of victimisation and the risk of unfair dismissal.

With less than a third of people with mental health problems receiving any treatment at all, Ed Miliband was right to say that it is “the biggest unaddressed health challenge of our age.”

Just imagine if one third of people with any form of physical illness, from cancer to a broken bone, went untreated. There would be a national outcry. We should express the same outrage at the lack of treatment for people with mental illness.

Back in 2012, Miliband became the first leader of the opposition to make a speech focused solely on mental health, arguing that people with mental illness must no longer be marginalised.

And, that same year, it was Labour votes in the House of Lords that forced the government to write “parity of esteem” between mental health and physical health services into law.

These are encouraging steps in the right direction. Yet rhetoric is one thing, reality is another and under this government the two do not match up.

In his Liberal Democrat conference speech, Nick Clegg echoed the call for parity of esteem for mental and physical health and earned himself some headlines as a result. Yet there was more than a smell of hypocrisy hanging over his speech. On

David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s watch, mental health services have been cut by 20 per cent more than other services and mental health trusts have lost £250 million of their funding since 2012.

In their first year clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) — new NHS groups — only spent an average of 10 per cent of their annual budgets on mental health, despite mental illness accounting for 23 per cent of the national burden of disease.

These are real cuts being felt by our communities. I have visited service users up and down the country and have heard their real concerns about how their services are being squeezed, mental health nurses moving on and services closing down.

Funding cuts alone would be bad enough but at a time when demand for mental health services has shot up the impact has been devastating.

Under this government, we have seen the number of specialist mental health doctors and nurses drop, bed shortages, vulnerable people having to travel of hundreds of miles to get the treatment they need and very ill children being detained in police cells because there is nowhere else for them to go.

I am pleased that thanks to the focus the Labour government placed on expanding capacity in mental health services with the introduction of the Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies programme, we are now in a place where we are able to bring waiting time standards in line with those for treatments for physical illness. However, alongside reducing waiting times it is absolutely critical that people have access to these services in the first place.

Less than half of patients who sought help for anxiety and depression last year received any treatment. This is why Labour will rewrite the NHS constitution to create a new right to talking therapies — just as people currently have for drugs and other treatments.

Good mental health starts in our workplaces, our schools and our communities — which is why Labour’s mental health taskforce is focusing on the best approach to improving our nation’s mental health across society.

Labour is putting mental health at the heart of our vision for an integrated health and social care system.

We will repeal the coalition’s Health and Social Care Act as a priority, and bring together mental health, physical health and social care services into one integrated service delivered to where people need them, when they need them.

Luciana Berger is MP for Liverpool Wavertree and shadow minister for public health