The Mental Health Crisis Summit takes the first step in building a campaign

 

 

The Mental Health Crisis Summit held at The Royal Free Hospital on Saturday was an event that I feel privileged to have been able to attend.  Most of us know that mental health services have always been the cinderella service in the NHS and some of us will know this by our own experiences of mental illness.  Although I have my own catalogue of horrendous personal experiences (and some excellent ones) in psychiatric hospitals I am aware that today we are witnessing a crisis in mental health unlike anything we have seen before.  I felt at the end of my tether, losing patience with a Government that clearly doesn’t mind being responsible for so much suffering and I needed to believe change was possible.  I headed up to London barely able to believe that it was possible to get more than a handful of people together with an aim of addressing mental illness in our communities.  I came away, in a much better frame of mind.

Psychaitry – the Cinderella service of the NHS

I speak from bitter experience of mental illness.  I have experienced the best and worst of psychiatry.  The best came just a few years ago when I finally was diagnosed correctly and the doctors admitted they didn’t know how to help me. It was a groundbreaking moment to be told by one psychiatrist that he had no idea how to help me because nobody had ever admitted that before, although I had known it was true.  My story reflects how little understanding there is of mental illness.  I was successfully treated eventually but the unit I was treated in closed four years later.  My story also reflects how psychiatry is now going backwards.