Mental Health Awareness Week, which began a week ago on Monday and closes today, has been run since 2001 by the Mental Health Foundation. The annual theme this year was "Take Action" — an invitation to readers, employers, schools and local authorities to take a small, concrete step toward better mental health, on the principle that the cumulative effect of small steps is larger than the sum of their parts. The campaign material was, as is the form, calm, well-designed and unobjectionable. Boards in NHS Shetland, NHS Highland, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde and elsewhere produced their own materials, and ran community sessions through the week.
The trouble with awareness weeks, eight days in, is the same trouble they have had since the format was invented: the awareness rises and the system underneath does not move. This is not a criticism of the third-sector organisations that do the campaign work. It is a criticism of the funding architecture that surrounds them.
The clearest example, in the Scottish data, is the Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) waiting list. The Scottish Government's commitment that no child should wait more than 18 weeks for a first CAMHS appointment was first set in 2018 as a target to be hit by 2021. It was missed in 2021. It was missed again in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. The most recent quarterly publication from Public Health Scotland, covering the quarter to March 2026, showed continued variation across health boards: some boards now hitting the 18-week target consistently, others — NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde in particular — still well short.
The pattern over the last six years is not a downward slide. It is a plateau, with some boards improving and others holding steady at unacceptable levels. The volume of referrals into CAMHS has risen sharply, with the most pronounced rises in the post-pandemic cohort. Workforce constraints — clinical psychologists, child psychiatrists, allied mental-health professionals — are the binding factor in those boards still missing the target. None of this is mysterious. None of it is news. None of it has yet been addressed at sufficient scale.
The awareness rises and the system underneath does not move. That is not the campaigners' fault.
The picture in adult mental-health services is more uneven, but not better. Community Mental Health Team waits, where measured, are longer than the equivalent figures from the late 2010s. Psychological-therapies access — the 18-week target for which has, like CAMHS, been on the books since 2014 — has improved slowly in some boards and gone backwards in others. The bedrock issue is the supply of trained therapists, and the bedrock issue beneath that is the cost of training, registration and supervision against the public-sector salary structure that the third sector is trying to compete with at the margin.
Local authorities, who carry some of the community-mental-health load through social work and through grants to third-sector providers, have had a difficult three years on this budget line. The 2025–26 council settlements squeezed discretionary social-work spending; the third-sector mental-health providers most affected were the small, specialist organisations that historically have been the most innovative, often working with specific populations — young men, refugee communities, older adults in remote rural areas — that the statutory services have struggled to reach.
None of which makes the Mental Health Awareness Week message wrong. The actions the campaign points at — reaching out, getting outside, sleeping, eating, asking for help — are evidence-based, low-cost and useful. The campaign organisers are not pretending they substitute for clinical services. The problem is that the surrounding political conversation often treats the campaign as if it does substitute for them.
The new Holyrood, which sat for the first time on Thursday last week, will not have mental health as an easy ride. The 2026–27 budget cycle is already constrained. The Scottish Government's national mental-health budget, in real terms, has been roughly flat over the past four budgets, against a referral picture that is steadily rising. The arithmetic does not work, and has not worked for some time. The conversation that the new Health Secretary — whoever that turns out to be after this week's cabinet decisions — will need to have, with the Cabinet Secretary for Finance, is whether the mental-health portfolio is in fact funded to deliver the strategic-framework commitments published over the last two parliamentary terms. The honest answer is that it is not.
What might "take action" look like in policy terms? The campaigners themselves have, over the past three years, settled on a small number of asks: ring-fenced expansion of psychological-therapies training places, multi-year funding settlements for third-sector providers so they can plan beyond the annual grant cycle, a workforce plan for CAMHS that is matched to the actual referral pipeline, and a transparent reporting framework for community-mental-health waits across all 14 boards. None of these are exotic. None of them are cheap. None of them are unaffordable on the scale of the Scottish budget. They are the asks that have been on the table at every parliamentary committee evidence session for the past three years.
"Take Action" is a good slogan. It deserves to be more than a slogan. The next year of decisions in Bute House will say whether anybody at the cabinet table heard it as one or the other.
By Iain Crawford — Society Correspondent at The Scottish Review. He writes on public services, mental health and the third sector.