Experts have criticised Labour Party Health Secretary Mr Streeting for saying mental health problems overdiagnosed.

Wes Streeting has been savaged after claimaing one Personal Independence Payment condition was “overdiagnosed”. Experts have criticised Labour Party Health Secretary Mr Streeting for saying mental health problems overdiagnosed.

The h ealth secretary’s commented that too many people are ‘written off’ has sparked warnings against stigmatising people. Asked whether he thought overdiagnosis of some conditions was a problem, he told BBC One’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg: “I want to follow the evidence and I agree with that point about overdiagnosis.

“Here’s the other thing: mental wellbeing, illness, it’s a spectrum and I think definitely there’s an overdiagnosis, but there’s too many people being written off and, to your point about treatment, too many people who just aren’t getting the support they need.

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“So if you can get that support to people much earlier, then you can help people to either stay in work or get back to work.”

Minesh Patel, the associate director of policy and campaigns at the charity Mind, said: “Applying for benefits is not an easy process. People with a mental health problem must go through a lengthy and arduous assessment process, with decisions to not award support often overturned at appeal stage.

“We must also be extremely careful with the language around mental health diagnoses, which risks creating a climate of stigmatising people’s real experiences and undermining the opinions of medical professionals.”

Robert Howard, a professor of old age psychiatry at University College London, said: “I’m really anxious that the kind of language that Wes Streeting was using this morning will be used to justify further disinvestment in mental health services.

“If we want to get people with mental illness back to work, the way to do that is to make sure they can access timely and effective treatment, and pretending that they haven’t got a real illness, it just doesn’t make me feel encouraged that the government will invest sufficiently in mental health services to help people get back.

“There’s so many young people with kind of chronic generalised anxiety who can’t work. The way to get them back to work isn’t to kind of shame them and punish them and tell them they’re not ill. The way to get them back to work is to make sure that they have access to proper psychological therapy and treatment so they can be fit and go back to work.”