I’ve had a pretty darn rough couple of weeks and I thought I’d
talk about what I’d been through.
I was sent to an emergency assessment with a community psychiatric
nurse because the counsellor at my university service (I’m taking some time out
of my studies and I was given special funding to have six sessions whilst
technically not a student) was really worried about me with regards to thoughts
of self harm and suicide.I didn’t feel that the assessment was a very good experience,
you sit a suicidal person down and ask them to go talk through everything that
makes them feel bad and then just send them out into the world again. Also I
was accused of finding the proceedings “boring” because I was slouching in my
chair and not wanting to make eye contact, in actual fact I just find any form
of talking therapy both physically and emotionally draining.
I was told I would hear in 1-2 weeks what they decided so I
went on as normally as I could given that I was in the middle of one of the
worst depressive episodes of my life.
So a couple of Fridays ago, just over a week later, I receive
the letter from the nurse, I was already in a pretty bad place because I was
post night out and nights out are never very good for me because it’s a time at
which I feel most inferior to my peers and especially to my close friends. Also
this particular night a friend of mine had said something truly awful to me
when I was in a really bad state.
I open the letter and I’m told that after a meeting with the
rest of the team they have decided that “We do not think that at this time we
have anything to offer you” and that should my “symptoms become worse” they
would be happy to reassess me. Needless to say it wasn’t what I need to hear,
it just made me feel that there really wasn’t any point in living any more, if a service that was meant to be
keeping me alive was turning me away when I was, at some points, really battling
incredibly hard not to step out in front of a car I really had no idea how I
was going to be worse without actually doing something serious to myself. I
think this way of talking to severely depressed people is at best irresponsible
and at worse downright dangerous.
So I spiralled into a really bad place, I so wanted to be dead,
I was having near constant visions of serious self harm, and was just so, so
scared of what I might do to myself. I didn’t want to go into the kitchen
because there were sharp things and hot things there and I didn’t want to leave
the house because of the traffic, so I didn’t. I pretty much stayed in my room for
3 days, I cancelled all of my plans that meant leaving the house and I needed
my housemate to prepare food for me.
Fortunately I had my final session with my counsellor on the
Monday morning, however I knew I wouldn’t be able to get there myself, I was
lucky enough that my mum was able to take the day off work so she could drive
me (no crossing roads needed).
My counsellor was fantastic; she rang the nurse but was told
I would have to be reassessed (I think I was unable to adequately articulate my
situation for a variety of reasons in my original assessment), and my GP to try
and get me an emergency appointment as I was probably the worst I’ve ever been.
On getting in touch with my GP she was told that going to A&E would
probably be best, and she also explained this to my mum.
My memories of A&E are hazy, however a few things stick
in my mind, when I was seen by the doctor I was told there was nothing “medically”
wrong with me but there was something psychologically wrong with me. I can only
assume that he had meant to say that there was nothing physically wrong with
me. But it still smacks of an attitude that I still believe is present amongst
those in the general medical profession, that treating mental illness isn’t “proper”
medicine.
Also a couple of things that the mental health nurse that I
saw said, firstly that I had been
wrongly assessed and that I needed to be seen by a psychiatrist, not a community
nurse and that if he had a pound for every time a patient had been assessed by
the wrong person and ended up presenting in A&E he would be a rich man. So
if it happens so often why isn’t something being done about it?! That’s the
problem, those of us that want to fight for better services are those with the
least capacity to be able to.
Secondly he also said that he would much rather see me in
A&E like I was on that day rather than with a stomach full of paracetamol
and that if I ever thought that I needed to be in A&E but didn’t have a way
of getting there just to ring 999. This is probably the best thing that could
have been said in that situation.
It’s been a week since then and I’m much better, I’m no
longer completely scared of myself but I am still in a very bad place, and I’m
just grateful for my friends and my parents. I also saw my GP today and she
agreed that the letter was extremely badly phrased, and basically had to
apologise for what I’d been through.
