I am wondering in your locality, whether you find engagement with community mental health actually useful?
Will not disclose my experiences yet, but I’d like to see if there is a common experience seeing as there is a lot of geography between us
Does any where do it right, and how?
I’m not sure what the equivalent to community mental health services is here. I got help from a psychiatrist, psychiatric nurse, psychologist and peer support specialist. It was extremely helpful. It was local, i.e. specific to just one section of my city. Is that a community mental health service? Or are community mental health services care without specialists of any kind?
Yes, big time! I do yoga and art through CoolAid, and I attend the art exchange and support groups/peer support through MHRP. Hugely helpful!
Here the community mental health team are part of the NHS in the UK, and they’re referred to as CMHT’s
They’re part of the health service, and charged with care in the community, so it’s a government funded program rather than charity organisations
That said, we have community mental health services provided by the charitable sector also, so I guess these count also if that’s peoples main provider
Hmm. . .
No.
People Are Annoying.
We have the charities part but our health system is not organized like that. We have local government health services that are funded by the local government instead of the national one, but they are not organized in community mental health teams.
My care co-ordinator left for devon about 6 months ago. They offered me a support worker, but all he wanted to do was go out for coffee, in the town where im likely to get paranoid, so blew him out.
The cpn sees me at home for my jab once a month - and thats it. Im left to my own devices. I will ring up the duty cpn, now and again to have a moan and vent.
Was gonna ring them this morning actually - but ive perked up so didnt bother.
Sure it does.
U just have 2 do it regularly 2 see improvement.
I have a depot at home every 3 months. I’m seen annually by the pdoc. The engagement is therefore very minimal. The difference between here in Wiltshire vs how it was in Essex is that the mental health workers are much friendlier here. That may be because of the work my (s)/dau did to enable me to move here. Here I have an annual care act review. In Southend I only had one home visit. between 2005-2017. I was never told about the care act.
What’s the care act @firemonkey ?
Do you have a link to look at?
No. They’re so horrible I wind up leaving in worse shape than I arrived in. Rural mental health services tend to hire the losers who couldn’t pass muster in a larger center.
Care in the community was supposed to be a major step forward. Unfortunately it’s been let down by decades of grossly inadequate funding. Both of the parties that have formed governments in that time have performed badly when it comes to mental health. Unless you’re an acute case,deemed like to hurt yourself or others, and preferably with an addiction/involvement with the criminal justice system you become a 2nd tier patient.
You are more likely to be seen as a priority if illness wise you’re coping at 95% 90% of time and acutely ill the rest of the time , than if you’re non acute and consistently functioning at a 35% level. If in the latter situation having support and proactive family/stepfamily in your corner is vitally important. The trouble being many don’t have that, or it’s too far away.
On hindsight I should have agreed to move a long time before I did. I would get very anxious at the thought of doing so. It took the greater anxiety of my block of flats being earmarked for demolition to make moving less anxiety provoking than staying where I was. It didn’t register at the time but I’d fallen into a deeper and deeper rut while coming to this and other forums and acting as though I was doing reasonably well. Truth is you can get to a point where you get totally blase about how you’re doing.
A good, well funded mental health service will pick up on such things, but one starved of adequate funding won’t a lot of the time. To that can be added a social care system increasingly not fit for purpose. When you reach my age with dxes of schizophrenia and ASD then social care needs can trump the need to alleviate the negatives and positives.
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