World Mental Health Day – Lets talk mental health. #WorldMentalHealthDay #WMHD2014 #StopStigma

Some testimonies that we’ve already received:

Bus Passes for people with mental health conditions:

“I live in Bromley, and the freedom pass bus form has changed since two years ago, two years ago the cmht stamped the form and cpn signed it, you needed a supporting letter.

Now you need to describe how your illness affects you day to day, get a supporting letter from the mental health team to explain illness and how it affects ability to drive, list medication, put in a proof of id with a picture on it driving licence passport and many people do not have either.

You need a letter from the last 12 months from the DVLA saying that you cannot drive due to condition and reasons why and that is automatic qualification you do not need to fill the rest of the form out.

The form from Bromley is 6 pages long, you have a month to fill it out and may be assessed by and OT in a face to face assessment. Two years ago the bus pass forms were sent out in November/early December, they have moved that forwards to middle of September. My friend who has schizophrenia dropped her form back yesterday with letter from psychiatrist, her care co ordinator said a care plan was enough and refused to write a letter for her, how many will be in this position?

The form has tightened up from two years ago, if on pip dla high mobility automatic entitlement to pass, my friend did ask the civic centre how long would it take to process her application and they said it could take as much as five months!

Bromley has the highest application of freedom passes for older people in the borough, they are about to make a further £60m cuts here after £65m of cuts done to date”

Personality Disordered

 “So much of benefits descriptors are not MH specific enough or are squeezed into LD i.e setting an alarm clock & people have to make MH ‘fit’ into physical problems.

A major issue is obtaining letters/reports when discharged given MH services are now very short term, you present and if ‘serious’ enough get diagnosed/medicated/CBT’d for a while then off you go till the next crisis. 70% of MH SU’s are unemployed through multiple disadvantages which means after discharge it’s quite likely to remain on benefits long term. Yet MH services make no provision for continuing letters/reports to be made available.

A really nasty underhand card being played out within MH services by commissioners/front line staff is to reclassify people as ‘personality disordered’ because that justifies discharge and not offering support because PD is viewed as pretty much untreatable (despite DH rhetoric). People have found themselves reclassified overnight to this diagnosis and this magically coincides with being discharged. The line of preventing “dependency” is also used to justify mass CMHT discharges instead of being honest and saying it’s down to cuts.”

Living with someone who has severe depression:

“I cannot pretend representing here all the partners, families of people who suffer from mental illness. My experience is with severe depression. What I still find the most difficult, is to comprehend what depression is. I can understand what a toothache feels like, or a headache, but the insufferable pain I witnessed for the past 6 years is as incomprehensible to me as it was on the first day. I can see the pain, the drawn features, the hand holding the face, all signs that the demons are torturing him, but I cannot get close enough to know what it feels like. And something in me does not what to get too close, in case too much empathy would also make me vulnerable to depression. I need to stay strong for both of us. And for my children too, it brought fears of their own vulnerability

I also became during these six years the repository of all the memories we shared together and that he had forgotten. And it was a lonely place to be.

Fortunately, he is getting better, and we can share again the memories of a bygone time. I can see a point where we will start looking at this period as a new beginning. We have not reached the end of the road yet, and there will be more bumps on the way but suddenly there is the prospect of a new future, even if it is with depression as a fellow traveller. “

My wilderness years:

“This is very difficult for me to write the memories are still very raw and painful, this is the first time I’ve told anyone what it was like, and I’m doing it so that it might help others.

I had had a severe breakdown in 2000, and I spent the next several years hiding from the world, I gave up work, let everything go and just basically slept all day. I’d lost all sense of caring about anything. With no income coming in the mortgage and loans stopped being paid, credit cards got maxed out, I stopped opening letters and answering the phone and I eventually had my house repossessed and got evicted.

I was lucky in one sense, my mother took me in and so I wasn’t’ out on the street, and my family were very supportive and understanding. I realise that that doesn’t happen to everyone and I still believe that if it wasn’t there for me I would have been sleeping on the streets.

You know the oddest thing about it all was that I still didn’t think that I had mental illness! I didn’t associate it with myself, I just thought that I was tired and if I rested a bit longer I would get my energy back and get myself back on my feet.

One thing you need to understand if you haven’t had clinical depression, is that there is no sense of time passing, you can live in a sort of limbo where minutes become hours become days become weeks become months become years, and you don’t really have any sense of that. You don’t really have any sense of anything, taste, sound smell, feeling, are all deadened senses. The world is in black and white, in a kind of fog.

So I moved in with my mother, and said to her I was tired and I needed to rest and then I would get back to normal. She was fantastic, she was patient, she was loving, she was there for me.

She gently said that I ought to go and see a doctor and I said no I’m alright, I’m tired I just need to rest a little longer, I’m not ill.

She would say the same thing to me every so often and I would give the same reply, I don’t know how many times this conversation was repeated.

Then I explained later to her that I was scared of going to see the doctor because he would tell me not to be lazy and tell me off.

So I carried on like that, after my house had been sold and the loans and credit cards payed off, there was some money left, and I lived off that as long as I could. People suggested that I should go onto benefits but I was too scared to do that, the thought of going to see people at the jobcentre who would tell me I had to get a job and and shout at me that I was being lazy.

This carried on for, I don’t know how long to be truthful, its back to having no sense of time passing, and I have little memory of those years at all.

But eventually the money run out. I had just enough self respect left to realise that I couldn’t bring myself to live off my retired mother. And having no other option, I applied for benefits and went to see my GP. I can’t remember what year this was, but I have clear flashbacks of moments from those times.

I remember phoning up to apply for benefits, I thought I should apply for JSA, but the lady on the phone asked about my situation and said I would be better off applying for ESA. I said, I’m not really ill, I’m just tired, I’m going to see a doctor I’m going to be better soon. But the lady on the phone said, well why don’t you apply for ESA and then when you are better you can move onto jobseekers. I thought she was very kind and asked her to send me the forms.

So then I made an appointment to see my GP, I was terrified. I knew, I was certain, it was going to go badly that he would tell me to stop being lazy and that he was going to shout at me even for wasting his time. But I had told my mother I would go to see him and so I did.

He didn’t shout, he didn’t tell me I was lazy. He listened. And then he asked me a series of questions – I know now they were a set of screening questions to see how severe my condition was and if I was suicidal. And then we discussed things that we could do about it, to help me.

After we had the discussion and I had a few things to try out, like he suggested trying to go out every day and we had a discussion about medication, and I was going to try out citalopram (which I still take to this day, its very good), he said come back and see me every month and we’ll see how you are getting on.

That day at the doctors was several years ago, and since that day, everything has slowly steadily and sometimes painfully, been getting a little better, and a little better. Its been a slow but sometimes wonderful recovery, I’m not ‘well’ yet, and I may never be fully recovered.

What I have done though, is learned coping mechanisms, so that my depression (and later I discovered) severe anxiety disorder, can be managed. And I’m using those coping mechanisms, that toolbox in my head, so that I can, in spite of my impairments, take part in the world around me and I’m even starting to learn to enjoy it. Sometimes.

And I have hope for a continuation of my recovery, as I get better and more practised at using my coping mechanisms I can do a little more, a little more and stretch my boundaries. Gently and with tolerance to myself I’m learning to not only live with my mental health condition but to have a life with my mental health condition.

There is much more to write, I would like to write more about my recovery but writing this far has been exhausting enough! I may return another day and write part 2 about that recovery.

But mostly I would like people who have mental distress and who are suffering alone with it, to read the message I most want to send:

You can’t deal with this alone. Please reach out for help. There is good help available and it can make a real difference to your life. It did for my life, it can for yours.”