Health Care Crisis in UK - NHS and Health Care

Paul - The depression syndrome is largely social but its spectrum covers mild effects right up to psychotic breaks. One notices that any article on mental health usually represents some sort of agenda. Even the caring ones, in fact they are the worst because sometimes people promote particular trends as if they were the whole of the matter. Personality disorders are not treatable with medication and having met some who have them their curse is they cannot be counselled or persuaded. The usual problem is that they are incapable of thinking, learning or reflecting on powerful emotions. It is social workers who push personality disorder as a mental health issue, mostly because they want to raid the mental health budget. Thus this article would be read among the people I have met who have had a label put on them with an eye to seeing which fiefdom profits, the inevitable cynicism of the old lag. We are withdrawing into... the broad daylight. If you can survive and behave yourself you may get to live to old age. No hard feelings about not being top of the political agenda. We like it. Drug users get all this time politically but they die, they become diabetics, their bodies at 29 are those of a 65 year-old. So, we will not draw attention to ourselves and live as I do as part of a wider town community. Those who start this "I'm right and 6.5billion others are wrong" seem to arrive at the cemetery quicker whether large sums of money were lavished on them or not. The issue with depression is whether or not one is in a terrible rage at oneself: this is about 50% of it but not all. If so, you may have to learn to channel it. If that is your actual problem and you know it and act on it you will survive, if not...you are going to hurt everyone around you at least. Depressed people sometimes do not seek help, they seek affirmation and that which prolongs their condition, a paradox of the condition. The depression epidemic cannot be a true mental health problem since how could so many people develop such a thing? Are you angry at your life? Are you sure that certain things are worth pursuing? Does the prospect of death fill you with a type of self-loathing? We are not all machines and media narcissists.


Existentialist - I was a schools counsellor for six years, until I was made redundant following heavy cuts in the funding to our service. During that time, a considerable number of the referrals I made to child and adolescent mental health services - another chronically overstretched service - were bounced back, even where the referral had followed a credible suicide attempt. In this world, it is not enough to be merely suicidal - you have to be "suicidal enough" to warrant referral to a service which frequently can offer no more than a monthly meeting with a case worker and the supervision of a psychiatrist.
We're averaging about one suicide per year of schoolchildren in this community of 100,000 - most of those who die are already known to the mental health services, but the resources simply don't exist to help them and save their lives. If they need acute care, the nearest children's psychiatric ward is two hours' drive away (and is usually full, anyway), so the options are either to admit them to a local adult psychiatric unit, or leave them at home.
As a professional in the field, I frequently despair of their prospects.