Hello and welcome to a special episode of Women of Balls.

Many are feeling the pinch from the cost of living crisis.

Choices between heating and eating have become routine for some households as bills and food costs rise.

Data shows that the number of people searching ways to reduce stress online has increased by 216% in the past month alone.

And mounting evidence suggests that when it comes to money worries, women are the most likely to be the ones cutting back on spending,

working harder and taking on the mental load for household finances.

The science of poor mental health can vary and are difficult to

spot, but getting help early can be essential to a fast and effective recovery. Are there preventative

measures that can be implemented? At a time and cost cutting can be essential, what are some of the

practical ways we can take care of ourselves? For this episode, I'm joined by a panel of experts on

this topic, Maria Colfield, who is the Minister for Mental Health, where her department also oversees

women's health, Catherine Rutter, who is the director for customer inclusion at Lloyd's Banking Group,

and Kim Ledbeter, Labour MP for Batley and Spen, who received an MBE for her services to social cohesion and

combating loneliness. This podcast is kindly sponsored by Lloyd's Banking Group.

Maria, to begin, I suppose with your ministerial hat on, we know during the COVID crisis,

during the pandemic, mental health problems worsened, along with weight times.

How have you seen the cost of living crisis affect the problem?

Well, I think it's exacerbating, and we are really focused on not just improving services

for people with mental illness, so people who may be bipolar or schizophrenic or have eating

disorders, but actually in the same way, we promote health promotion in physical health we want to make

sure that people are mentally their mental health is well and that we're supporting that and what we're

seeing at the moment is yes mental health struggled during COVID and very quickly we've gone into

...