TODAY is World Mental Health Day — a good time to reflect on how society treats people with serious mental illness and some of the political issues that affect them.

For people with schizophrenia the last 50 years has been a time of enormous change. The move away from treatment in large asylums and towards a system of community based care along with the advent of the new antipsychotic drugs have radically altered the life quality of people suffering from this cruel condition.

The benefit of the antipsychotic drugs should not be underestimated. Before the introduction of these drugs in Britain about 70 per cent of people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia were continuously confined in mental hospitals, often for years at a time. Today it is only about 5 per cent and the average length of stay in hospital is measured in months.

But while we have made great strides in achieving better clinical outcomes for people with schizophrenia, in many ways there has been little progress in the way society treats them — and in some ways the picture has distinctly worsened.

Take for instance the issue of using police cells as places of safety. For decades it has been the established practice for people thought to be in danger of harming themselves or others to be detained in police cells while a mental health assessment was arranged. This practice was widespread and in 2013-14 there were about 6,000 detentions of this sort in Britain and Northern Ireland. Quite rightly this has been brought into the spotlight recently and has been the subject of criticism by the media and parents of some of those detained.

However what hasn’t been discussed is the root cause of this problem, and that is the cutbacks in mental health beds across the country. The alternatives put forward by the government in its most recent guidance to police are frankly risible. While the new guidelines laudably emphasise the use of police cells only where other settings are not appropriate, they bizarrely suggest that people in danger should be housed with friends or relatives until a mental health bed becomes available.

In addition, the new guidance does nothing to recognise that the core problem here is the chronic shortage of beds — particularly secure beds in the mental health system. This is the result of several years of real-terms cuts in funding to the mental health trusts. Most mental health trusts are now reporting waiting times for acute beds and in one case a trust recently reported one patient waiting 17 days before a bed could be found for them.

While it must be true that detaining people with schizophrenia in the criminal system rather than in the health system is both morally wrong and counter-therapeutic, it is unclear how this practice can realistically be ended until sufficient beds are provided in the mental health system. Until that time a police cell will continue to be the safest place for someone in the acute stage of a psychotic breakdown.

Cuts in mental health beds also force the mental health service to send patients to mental health units outside of their own area, sometimes hundreds of miles away from the family and friends that can provide that support network which is vital when someone is in crisis. Between 2011-14 the number of patients sent to units outside of their own area tripled to over 3,000 per year.

The government has also been making much of its new police diversion schemes, now being trialled in some parts of the country, which attempt to divert people with mental health issues out of the criminal system and into the mental health system.

However the need for them has to be questioned. Since the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act regulated the treatment of suspected offenders in police custody there has always been a clear and explicit responsibility on the police sergeant in charge of the custody suite at the police station to arrange for the suspect to be psychiatrically assessed if they had any evidence that mental illness might be an issue in the case. Police forces have routinely ignored that obligation for decades.

Perhaps the new schemes will provide a workable alternative to the old law but it remains to be seen whether there will be the will on the part of the police on the ground and the resources provided by the government to make them work.

And while government cutbacks continue to hit people with mental illness David Cameron’s big society has not filled any of the gaps. Mental illnesses like schizophrenia are not popular causes with the public and the public by and large give very little money to them. For every £1 spent by government on mental health the public gives just 0.3p while the equivalent donation by the public to cancer charities is £2.75.

Unfortunately the position of the left wing of British politics has not always been helpful. Psychiatry was not always popular among the old left and many on the left felt more at ease with a position that was generally anti–psychiatry and anti the big pharmaceutical companies. This position chimed with the popular anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and ’70s which was very influential in the closure of the old asylums and the move to community care.

But if socialists believed that the anti-psychiatry movement would secure better services for people with mental illness, they were sadly very wrong. Today schizophrenia kills more people in Britain and Northern Ireland than road accidents, with most deaths being suicide. Over two-thirds of the people incarcerated in our prisons have at least one diagnosed serious mental illness. Some have observed that one obvious affect of care in the community was to move many people with serious mental illness out of the asylums and into prison.

Nor is it simply suicide that is killing people with mental illness. People with major mental illnesses like schizophrenia are much more prone to physical illnesses like diabetes, stroke, heart disease and some cancers: even allowing for suicide the mortality rate for people diagnosed with schizophrenia is far higher than in the general population.

Employment prospects for people with schizophrenia are also very poor. Despite the fact that most of those diagnosed with schizophrenia will substantially recover over time, in Britain today only about 13 per cent of those diagnosed are in any kind of work.

The reasons for this are complex: some would blame stigma among employers. However the truth is that there exists in Britain amongst employers, health workers, people with schizophrenia themselves and the general public an overarching mindset that sees permanent unemployment as the natural state for someone with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. This must be challenged.

Among activists in the labour movement and socialists in general the NHS remains one of the hottest topics — and yet while resources for other more popular conditions can always be found, schizophrenia still represents one of the most serious and largely unmet public health challenges of our day.

On World Mental Health Day, as on every other day of the year, seven more people with schizophrenia will die by their own hand in Britain and Northern Ireland. These losses will by and large not receive any attention from the media and society will continue to ignore this forgotten illness that causes so much suffering for all those living with schizophrenia.

And this tragedy will continue until society wakes up to the need to do something.

No amount of consciousness-raising will change the plight of people suffering from this cruel condition. Only struggle can bring about effective change in our society and the labour movement must play its role in achieving meaningful change for people with schizophrenia and the other major mental health diagnoses.

Because these people with schizophrenia are not “them,” they are “us.” They are the sons and daughters, wives and husbands, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers of workers and they deserve better.

• David Bell is director of Living with Schizophrenia, a British project which aims to promote a new understanding of schizophrenia (www.livingwithschizophreniauk.org).