Words are not enough for victims of mental illness
WE were having coffee when my friend took the call to say her brother was in the waking nightmare of psychosis.
He has been battling mental ill-health for many years and the family saw this coming in symptoms building over weeks.
They had seen it many times before – the paranoia, the withdrawal, the aggression, the fearful phone calls.
When a loved one has a chronic mental illness, the family exist in a bunker made of matchsticks, waiting for the blast.
This is not the flu, so popping round with soup is not the answer.
A loved one adrift in an alternative reality is tortured by voices, delusions and false beliefs.
As the crisis mounted, my kitchen became the war room and my friend knew the drill.
Calls were made to the out-ofhours psychiatric crisis team, a path well-trodden over the years, the same case history being painstakingly told each time, a five-minute micro-biography of chronic relapsing illness, rattling through the litany of distressing symptoms, the past suicide attempts, to the current state of unravelling.
For weeks, fears had been raised to a care team. Medication wasn’t being taken, such is the nature of the illness, and things were slipping fast. The notion of coming to harm wasn’t just a fear, it was a reality.
This persuasion was laborious. Imploring a team of strangers towards the goal of seeing your sibling on an acute psychiatric ward is certainly no prize.
Emergency teams visited but left, unconvinced he was in need of immediate hospitalising, despite the numerous red flags from a family well-educated in the symptoms over a lifetime of care.
The following day, another visit, which ended after three minutes when my friend’s brother asked the nurses to leave.
Four hours later there was a phone call. He’d been found at a well-known suicide spot, after police were tipped
off by a concerned member of the public.
If the potential killer in his brain had been an aneurysm, he would have been treated straight away.
But the response to his medical emergency was an ambulance with no wheels.
This is Mental Health Awareness Week, an attempt to open up discussion around a subject too long whispered about in the shadows.
So let me shout it from the rooftops – Scotland’s mental health services are not fit for purpose.
The spotlight fell on mental health services in Tayside after the case of David Ramsay was raised at First Minister’s Questions.
The 50-year-old took his own life in 2016 after twice being turned away from the Carseview unit in Dundee and told to take a breather, take his dog for a walk.
There are calls for a public inquiry but why limit it to Tayside when such services across the whole of Scotland are equally broken?
Research has shown that twothirds of us experience a mental health problem in our lifetime, a third have considered suicide and too many follow through on it.
It is laudable that in Mental Health Awareness week, we are being urged to talk about stress, depression and disorders of the mind but sometimes words are not enough.
In an editorial this week, Nicola Sturgeon urged people worried about mental health problems to contact their GP or NHS 24 , akin to recommending a water pistol to tackle a blaze.
Care is defined as the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance and protection of someone.
By such definition, our care in the community is a derisory misnomer, commodifying our most vulnerable with pitiful ever-decreasing budgets.
I don’t know the answers – that’s what my taxes pay the experts for. But I do know we should no longer tolerate the insanity of doing what amounts to nothing at all.