Earlier this week the outgoing president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists told the BBC that mental Health services are "a car crash". I would like to say that Community Mental Health Services (CMHS) are like General Patton's fictitious 1st U.S. Army Group. Patton’s army was a deception to convince the Nazis that the D-Day invasion would be via Calais. CMHS are a deception to convince people that the mentally ill are being looked after.
The truth is that people with mild mental illnesses, which could easily be cured, are being left to deteriorate until they are too ill to care for themselves. At that point they’re just left to die. It was the current Labour Health spokesman Andy Burnham, who as government minister in 2006 told mental health services to stop helping people so much. He also decreed that anyone whose health was not improving could be discharged by Mental Health Services.
When I was first referred to Mental Health Services, it was because I was having difficulty in coping with financial matters. Just opening letters & reading them. I had to wait 13 years for treatment. By then I was unable to write or open letters, unable to answer phone calls, unable to send or read email, I couldn’t go to an office & talk to a stranger, & if anyone came near my house without an appointment I hid in terror. In addition I was unable to cook, to sleep in a bed, to drive my car or to use my computer. I was paying for breakdown cover for my central heating by direct debit, but I couldn’t cope with phoning the firm & arranging for my heating to be fixed. I went through three terrible winters where I thought I might die of hypothermia. I told my Health Care Coordinator (the person allocated by my Community Mental Health Trust) about this, & she just said “That’s YOUR problem!” I was also unable to wear a coat, jacket jumper or anything else to keep off rain or keep me warm went I went out to shop in sub-zero temperatures. Oh yes, at one point I also had a rat in my house, & a serious leg infection which permanently left me disfigured. My Care Coordinator was not interested in any of this.
When I finally got treatment at a specialist NHS unit, my therapist said I was so ill I should be in full time residential care, “but they’ve closed down all the places that used to give that sort of care in order to save money”. She was their most experienced therapist & had been dealing with people like me for over ten years. I should say that some of the people I met at the unit had been waiting for treatment for over 20 years and were even more ill than I was.
If the most evil paedophile mass murderer had been neglected like us there would have been an international outcry by Human Rights organisations, but no one is interested in the mentally ill. What makes this worse is that some of us, including me, developed our illnesses because we were crime victims.