Health minister Jacqui Smith yesterday issued for consultation a wide ranging strategy aimed at improving services and addressing the specific needs of women with mental health problems.

Forum Response: SANE

Majorie Wallace, chief executive of SANE, told ePolitix.com: "We might as well forget all the optimistic strategies proposed while there remains little chance that a woman suffering from depression, anxiety, or other mental illness will receive decent in-patient care when so many of our acute wards are squalid, overcrowded and rife with street drugs and aggression.

"What we need are specialised units to give time, space and sanctuary to those who, because they may present no immediate risk to others, are left to cope at home - often alone and suicidal."

Forum Response: Depression Alliance

A spokeswoman for the Depression Alliance, told ePolitix.com: "While Depression Alliance welcomes any government commitment to mental health, we are concerned that we have heard it all before. Certainly government commitments to single-sex accommodation is nothing new, these commitments have been around since the 1980s, but with too few beds to meet to high a demand, no government has ever been able to deliver.

"Working with women whose mental health has been impaired by factors such as poverty, child sex abuse and domestic is welcome, but is diminished unless government gives a commitment to tackle these issues at source rather than just to pick up the pieces after things go wrong.

"In the end we must judge government on what it does, not on what it says. In this respect we should note that the announcement on women's mental health comes just a week after the publication of a national suicide reduction strategy that prioritised the mental health of young men!

"In the background, is recently published draft legislation that would remove most of the safeguards that currently protect people with mental illness in England and Wales. Meanwhile the Mental Health Tsar is investigating the NHS to see why a large portion of the £300 million of government investment in mental health service improvement in England has, apparently, been spent on cutting waiting lists elsewhere.

"At a time when mental health services are under-funded and in crisis, with a 25 percent shortage of psychiatrists, and similar shortages in other mental health professions, a priority on any one group must result in a withdrawal of services from another.

"Government seems unable to make up its mind what the priorities should be. A few years ago it was older people. Last week it was young men. This week it is women. Who will be next week's priority group? And will it matter anyway if we fail to create a legal framework based on equality, empowerment, effectiveness and efficiency, in which properly resourced, 21st century mental health services meet the needs of everyone affected by mental ill health?

"Perhaps, to paraphrase the prime minister, everyone with a mental illness should be able to see the service provider of their choice at a time of their choosing. This is the priority that government should be setting for mental health services, not rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic."