Cygnet Harrow Hospital where patients from St Pancras Hospital were moved to

AROUND 15 years ago a well-worn statistic was doing the rounds that one in four people had an undiagnosed mental health condition.

At the time it was considered shocking that such a large number of people in Camden were suffering on the inside. Today most people will be hard-pressed to think of anyone they know that isn’t struggling in this way.

Of course there is a big difference between milder forms of anxiety, depression and behavioural issues and the kind of severe conditions that get people sectioned in – sometimes brutally run – hospitals, (How vulnerable NHS patients were sent to ‘inadequate’ private hospital, November 2).

Few people will experience this kind of oblivion. But we should not forget that it is a fate that could befall any of us.

The NHS trust sent out a reassuring statement yesterday saying it believed the group patients were being properly looked after in the privately run facility.

The truth is these vulnerable people have been treated like cattle, shunted across London, only to be shunted back again – when the construction delays are sorted.

Managers say the Cygnet services were thoroughly checked before the decision was taken and that hospital was rated good at the time. But the Care Quality Commission report – one of the worst on record – suggests that the problems there had been entrenched.

The real villain in the piece here is not the NHS managers who are struggling with an impossible hand. It is the successive governments who have overseen the steady erosion of beds for NHS patients since the early days of austerity began in 2010.

Hundreds of beds for mental health patients have been closed in Camden in the past decade – including a whole hospital, like the former Queen Mary House for dementia patients at the top of Hampstead and the Grove at the Royal Free.

Today mental health crises are far more widespread, the need for long-stay beds for dementia patients has hugely increased.

And who is there to pick up the slack? The private sector provides more than 40 percent of secure mental health beds in the UK.

Camden’s NHS has been shelling out £600,000 a month to a company that has been housing its vulnerable in what an official report has branded “inadequate” across the board.

There was a time, perhaps also back when just one out of four people were thought to have mental health problems, that an inadequate rating from the CQC would have provoked outrage. These ratings are now two a penny, and the race to the bottom is still going strong.