Mental health care shortages under fire after London trek
ATEENAGER who had to travel five hours to London to receive mental health treatment has criticised the lack of facilities in Wales.
As a primary school pupil, Cerys was happy, outgoing and confident. However, things started to change for the 18-year-old from south-west Wales when she became anxious after leaving the house.
Despite visiting her GP three times, the situation continued to snowball, until she found herself in a psychiatric hospital hundreds of miles from home.
Now, speaking as part of a Panorama investigation, the teenager has shared her experience to highlight the situation faced by hundreds of others.
“You feel like you need to be completely and utterly the illest you could ever be without dying just to receive help”, said Carys, speaking in the BBC programme.
“I used to be really confident, especially when I was in primary school.”
At around the age 13, things started to change.
She said: “Little things started to build up, so I found myself feeling a little bit more uncomfortable in social situations and felt uncomfortable going out into public places. It got to point where my anxiety was so overwhelming I couldn’t leave the house and I couldn’t go to school.”
Cerys visited her GP three times before getting specialist help. However, at that point, her mental health had already worsened.
She said: “I started developing symptoms of OCD. I was all to do with my fear of contamination, I would spend my day cleaning and cleaning my entire house.
“Not long after that it started to die out, but it developed into anorexia. It was something I could control. Where I couldn’t control the obtrusive thoughts, I could control the number going down on the scales, it gave me a distraction.”
For Cerys, things reached their lowest point after she stopped eating altogether. She was transferred to a Welsh hospital but it lacked specialist facilities to deal with eating disorders.
She said: “The crisis team came after being there for a week and they were like, right, we’ve got you a bed, it’s in London.
“Obviously, going to a psychiatric hospital in itself is really scary, being five hours away from home is really scary. Putting them both together is absolutely terrifying. As soon as I got there, I just cried my eyes out the entire night.”
Cerys’ situation is not unique. According to NHS Wales, the number of children seen out of area has increased by 8% in the last five years.
In England more than 1,000 children were treated away from home last year.
A total of 400,000 children were treated by Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services.
A Welsh Government spokesperson said efforts were being made to tackle staff issues. They said: “We are committed to ensuring young people can access mental health services as close to home as possible.”
■ You can see the full Panorama programme at 8.30pm tonight on BBC One.