Anybody living in the UK knows that our National Health Service is absolutely at breaking point. In this time of austerity, public service funding is the first to get cut and our NHS has not escaped a battering. We already know that nurses aren’t paid enough and if you can get an appointment with your GP inside of a fortnight, it’s a miracle.
Mental health services have taken a hit too. In the eight years that I have been within my local borough’s system on and off, I have seen it restructured on more than one occasion in an attempt to streamline the service and save money. This has had the knock-on effect of it becoming increasingly difficult to access care and resources when you really need them. I can’t afford to pay privately for the treatment that I need so I have to rely on our prized NHS. This also makes it incredibly frustrating when you know that you are suffering and, even worse, when you know that you are in a “crisis” and the earliest you can get seen is weeks away.
This has been brought home to me more so than ever in the past two and a half years. When Dave and I first separated I contacted the Emergency Assistance Team who told me I had to be referred by my GP so that’s what I did. I went to see my GP. My GP told me that the reaction I was having to recent events was “normal” and didn’t feel the need to onwardly refer me into the “system”. Fair enough I thought at the time. However, when my mental health deteriorated further after another few weeks, I knew that I had to do something. I circumnavigated the system to a certain degree in that I contacted my local Time to Talk branch via the Mind website. I submitted an online self-referral form and a few days later I was contacted by telephone for an initial assessment. Due to the deterioration in my mental health, the Time to Talk Supervisor decided that it was best for me to be onwardly referred back into the system. There was then two weeks of faffing around between my GP confirming the referral and the referral actually being received by the system. It then took another week for me to get a phone call to actually go and meet with the Emergency Assistance Team. I had to actually walk back into Nutlins to meet with Fiona. Thankfully, when you go to meet with the Emergency Assistance Team or the Home Treatment Team, you meet them on the ground floor whereas the closed wards are on the first floor.
Just walking back into Nutlins brought back memories. The smell, the layout of the waiting room, the fact that most of the staff are still the same and their posters are up on the walls. They are some vivid memories that I really didn’t want to revisit. Nothing much had changed in there in five years.
Fiona had met with me before, the first time I was admitted into Nutlins. She was working with the Home Treatment Team then and was the person who actually helped admit me into Nutlins. She knows Dave. She had met him so many times. She was genuinely upset when I told her what had happened. The procedure hasn’t changed much either. You tell them what’s been going on. I showed her where I had been cutting. She said that the cuts weren’t dirty but they were ugly. The ones on my back were probably going to scar quite badly but I didn’t care. It came down to the usual question “can you guarantee your safety?” Honestly, I didn’t know at that point but all I knew was that I didn’t want to go back into Nutlins, especially with nobody at home to look after the cat so I said that I could, for now. The Home Treatment Team came to visit me daily and if they couldn’t get to me, they would call me. They had Mum’s and Jill’s phone numbers so that if they couldn’t get hold of me, they had contact details for those who could.
The Home Treatment Team worked with me for around six weeks. This was to get me through the current “crisis” whilst I was being referred for a review by a psychiatrist. Would you believe that didn’t come in until July 2016! I’d started this process in early March. When I met with the psychiatrist it was for an assessment to see what treatment I needed and/or was after. That was basically a door slammed in my face. I was told that I wouldn’t be receiving any long-term treatment because I was currently going through a divorce. The divorce was considered a “surface issue” whereas I was after treatment for my underling BPD and Bipolar issues. I wanted to get to the bottom of what was going on in my head. There was no way I would be receiving treatment whist I was going through the divorce because it would side track everything.
Bizarrely, I totally understood this. I didn’t fight it. It makes absolutely perfect, logical sense. The down side of that is that you are left in limbo, out in the big wide world on your own whilst you’re trying to deal with your mental health issues alongside one of the most stressful things in life you can ever do – get divorced. This is when being good at blocking things out and not thinking about things comes in very handy. All I could do for the next few months was concentrate on the divorce. I couldn’t afford to try to work out my underlying issues and triggers when I was dealing with getting divorced.
The divorce was finalised in August 2017 and in January 2018, I went back to my GP to get referred again into the system. After the divorce had come through, I felt myself deteriorating again for the remainder of 2017 and by January, I felt I wanted to get into the system before I found myself in another “crisis”. The divorce was done. I knew that by the time I got an appointment with a Mental Health Nurse for a formal assessment, it would have been at least six months since the Decree Absolute so I knew that the divorce process could no longer be used as a reason not to treat me. When you think about it, it’s actually quite bad that you have to allow for extensive waiting times in your calculations as to when you need to get into treatment!
Well, I got seen by an assessor fairly quickly who then onwardly refers you to a member of the psychologies assessment team to decide what treatment you should have, if any and to go through your medication. This took a little while longer and I was finally seen in August of this year. Shocking I know but that is the state of the NHS. Over 6 months between first seeing my GP and finally being assessed for treatment by a Consultant Psychiatrist.
Being self-aware and having done some research, I’m pretty sure that Dialectical Behavioural Therapy is the best way forward for me. In recent years it has become more recognised globally as the way forward in overcoming BPD symptoms. Great. I know what I need. Let’s get to it. Erm, No. The budget in my borough has been decimated so much for services that DBT is now offered where I live because it is so expensive. I can’t afford to pay for it privately. It also turned out that I wasn’t going to have any treatment offered at all. This is because I have been through the rounds of CBT, one-on-one long-term counselling and various other treatments and groups. So, what was the answer? They upped my medication again and sent me on my way. As I am classified as highly functioning, I’m not eligible for Occupational Therapy groups and I am to investigate courses and groups myself within the Recovery College at Shooters Hill. They did say thought that if I was to find myself in a crisis situation again, I should contact my GP! Really? I can’t get to see my GP in under three weeks.
Oh, just brilliant. So, through a lack of funding I’m left flailing about in the real world trying to get through each day. All I want to do is be a functioning member of society again. I want to get back to work. I want to get back to a version of the person I was before. Obviously, I don’t want to be the same person because that didn’t work either. I just want to be the best version of myself that I can be.
The moral of this story? Don’t ever give up trying to get treatment. Circumnavigate the system where you live if you have to. If you’re in “crisis”, call the Samaritans, go to A&E if you think that you are genuinely a danger to yourself. Call a friend if you don’t want to sit in an A&E department for 4 hours. Yup, I’ve done that too and got forgotten about because they’d forgotten to contact the on-call psychiatrist so I just upped and left. Don’t give up. Contact your local Time to Talk, details of which can be found on the Mind website (www.mind.org.uk). Keep fighting. Make your voice heard and it will be. Send a message to me either via the blog site, my twitter page (@nutterhigh) or on my Facebook page (Living The BPD Life). I will reply. You are not alone.
The moral for me? Well, I have recently invested in a Dialectical Behavioural Therapy Workbook. Now, I don’t normally put much stock in self-help books, certainly the likes that promise to make you rich, thin, famous or will get you to stop smoking! However, this one has recommendations all over the place so I am going to give it a go. I won’t mention it just now. I’m going to try the exercises and I shall report back and then I’ll let you all know what it is. I’m a little cautious about starting it but I’m always nervous and worried before starting any sort of treatment because it normally means thinking about things and processing things that I haven’t thought about for a while because they are bloody painful!
Wish me luck as I go back into treatment (of sorts) and back to studying!
Living The BPD Life 