Reply To: Mental Health

[sarah]

Mostly fairly dire.
I was very lucky that after things went over the point of critical made worse by CMHT I had a good contact who happened to be on duty at that point and who got me through the next few months, but that was down to him not the system he worked in.
Unfortunately on having to move the whole palaver started again, all previous diagnoses and help given was completely disregarded and I was told so, even though I had only recently been discharged from CMHT.
The whole thing is just so disjointed because CMHT are separate from primary care providers who actually can/do provide therapies to what they would call quite a ‘high level’ so that from CMHT you can be sort of referred back to those providers for therapy rather than it being done in house so to speak. Getting to work out how they system is supposed to work is nigh on impossible and even if you manage that you have to have enough energy to do something about it, which when you are struggling is unlikely.
Case in point for the disjointedness is Psychiatrist ‘I know what I want you to do but from my informed position I cannot actually refer you to do it you have to go through this other system and get them to agree but I will write a letter that hopefully makes it clear.’
Apparently it didn’t make it clear and it was a huge fight, which culminated in the lovely pysch actually taking a call from me mid meltdown (only expected his secretary!) because I didn’t know what to do and him saying he would walk down the stairs to the other department and sort it. He did and not surprisingly he was right, I went from suicidal to pretty much ok for 18 months following that therapy and had no more contact with them or use any resources in that time.

Mostly in all my contacts with them I have decided they would rather I top myself than help me because at least then I wouldn’t be there as a problem anymore. Deciding to go back to them is a huge decision, because even if you know something is up and you are trying to nip it in the bud you know that to a certain extent your contact with them will make you worse not better.

After my most recent diagnosis which was triggered by yet another mental health assessment (asperger’s) there is no help at all post diagnosis. You are just sent on your way and told mental health services are not set up to help people with autism. As such there seem to be quite a lot of people with a late autism diagnosis, who have got to that on the basis of their mental health problems (anxiety, depression, self harm, PTSD all seem relatively common) who aren’t able to access anything that will help them therapy wise and will often not get much/any benefit from the commonly prescribed medications which seems fairly ridiculous.
Other than the 6 counselling/CBT sessions available from IAPT, which if you tick the boxes you can refer back to many times but I was told I would need to find out about autism myself first so I could guide the therapy… erm.

I do think it is really great for some people that you can in many areas self refer for these 6 sessions and there are many short group CBT courses that occur in the evenings (although they are apparently going away from that and been told to concentrate on one to ones, no idea why as they reach a lot of people that way!) but I think and others I have spoken to would agree that if your issues slip between what IAPT can provide help for, and not being enough for CMHT to want to bother with/take seriously that middle bit is sparse.

I am very grateful to the good CPN and that psychiatrist but that was because they were just inherently good people going beyond what they should have done not because of the system.

If anyone asks me now I suggest if they can get any care outside of the NHS from voluntary organisations or privately then do it. The only problem with that being that if you are not able to do that in the future the fact that you have had previous issues might not be down on your record right, but then given that my record from somerset was apparently irrelevant in wiltshire it probably doesn’t matter!