Why are mental health services in the UK so utterly shit?

It’s more than that. They are managed dreadfully, many staff just don’t do their job properly partly due to lack of investment and staff, a lot more training is needed and transition from children’s services( which are broken) and provision for the 18-25 group is shockingly poor.

Just another example of this government incapable of managing anything.

Over 10 yrs ago I had really good MH support via NHS - 1 on 1 counselling with an excellent professional, for over 6 months (the time it took to resolve the issue).

Then the funding was cut.

Now you’re lucky to get 6 half hour sessions with a trainee. It’s a joke. No, actually it’s terrifying.

Because the country borrow billions a week just to pay for welfare and debt interest. Because the number of net contributors is so low that paying for everything and giving it out free is no longer feasible.

But its not just MH services, its all public health services & all interlinked.

Maternity, GP services, A&E, Elective Surgery, Dental.

Of course none of this matters to those in Govt as they don't use public services & where they have, they don't face waits like the rest of us do.

That’s gold standard care and v difficult to get in the NHS. I am very glad it worked for you!

I am in two minds about needing to be residential and not being able to get that care in the community, if that makes sense. But I guess as a voluntary patient, perhaps being residential isn’t traumatic as people want to be there?

https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/12/07/britains-mental-health-crisis-is-a-tale-of-unintended-consequences. Unfortunately it’s very paywalled, but I read the full article in the paper edition last month. The article suggests that rising awareness of MH stuff and a greater tendency to medicalise feelings which would not have been classified as needing help 20 years ago, has pushed out care for the most serious cases, and of course this has happened at the same time as budgets have got tighter.

Yes, I think poverty is a massive factor.
And social media doesn't seem to be doing our teens any good.

Totally agree. It seems like every other person has mh issues. I understand the pandemic, cost of living crisis, homelesness etc are largely to blame but we do need to look at the levels of MH problems. maybe mh is just being better recognised. I have just left a job where I was completing disability applications for housing association tenants. The vast majority were claiming for mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism, depression, anxiety. When you look at the conditions they live in, unemployment, poverty etc you can absolutely see why MH issues are exacerbated though.

I think a bigger, more important, question is why is mental health so shit in the UK?

One woman was stripping naked and screaming to be sectioned as she was scared of the voices. She got told to go home, relax and they would call to check in later. We had to watch her walk in the opposite direction of her home hoping she wouldn't hurt herself or anyone walking past her.

Yanbu see it often with work. Even people they are aware of who have severe mental health issues and could be a danger to themselves and others just get told.... you'll get a call later and we will see how you feel then. Its awful.

My friend has a similar story re CAMHS. Her son is only now getting help, after friend had a complete meltdown at the GPs, in part to do with her son's deteriorating MH.

GP got on to CAMHS, who moved him up a tier and he is being assessed next week, more than 6 YEARS after his initial referral. It seems that only the top tier or two of need are getting any help at all. He's been out of school all that time, too.

The under-resourcing of CAMHS is creating more problems for adult MH services imo, because problems are going untreated for years.

The organisation I work for used to have a project solely dedicated to working with hoarders. Referrals came from the district/borough councils if they were council tenants, and from adult social care if they were in private rented or owner-occupiers and (iirc) it was jointly funded by both tiers of local government.

Needless to say, it no longer exists because the funding was cut a few years ago, despite the fact that it achieved excellent results.

You are looking at mental health services through rose tinted glasses if you think that it generally keeps people in severe risk safe and well. That is absolutely a huge postcode lottery.

My neighbour has tried to kill himself 5 times in the last 3 months and each time has been released with in a day and his parents are expected to look after him. 5 days ago I found out my friend, who was experiencing psychosis, had killed himself. He was very sick but there was no help.

Last year when I walked out in front of a car I was told there was noone in the crisis team who could see me. After my child's birth perinatal told me they were too full and as I was already under secondary care my psychiatrist should see me within 1 week of giving birth liasing with them. I was high risk for post partum psychosis. Noone saw me for 10 months despite my midwife and health visitor trying to find out what was going on. I have seen my psychiatrist in person since before the pandemic. They just call me once every 6 months now. No physical clinic. Completely useless service

6 weeks of CBT after a 6 month wait list is not helpful for the vast majority of people unless it's like minor and that's all the help anyone seems to be able to get where I live.

It’s a shit show! Anyone who unfortunately uses the services now this.

OP I’ve had 8 different psychiatrists since the start of lockdown. (Bipolar). It’s a standing joke when I have a team meeting about what my psychiatrist actually knew about me (I work in healthcare). It’s a combination of funding and not having the staff. There are so many vacancies at the moment. Everyone qualifies then goes private.

On the plus my newest psychiatrist has promised she’s staying! My team in work have a bet on for how long 😂

I'm not sure I emphasised enough that starting a new thread would be a better idea, passenger. Maybe on the Mental Health board, or possibly on Chat? Resurrecting old threads tends to just result in a sprinkling of new posters responding to the ancient OP without realising it's a zombie, followed by the thread rapidly petering out (and it can also be interpreted as hijacking someone else's thread).

By the way, I meant to say that it wasn't that there was anything in your post giving me the impression you were doing "Lo, a man"

I was just trying to make it clear that men definitely are allowed — and warning you that if you do ever see people being a bit tetchy about an individual male poster who's making a thing out of being male, the snark is generally because the poster has announced it with a subtext that pissed people off, not just because they're men (whereas perfectly normal stuff like mentioning that they're male when it's helpful to know that, or just saying that it's "he" when someone's called them "she", or whatever, is unremarkable) — it doesn't mean you're not welcome.

Very low funding.

Hi passenger; there are plenty of non-parents and plenty of men on MN, that's not a problem — but it's true that generally people will work on the assumption that most posters here are probably female, so if your sex is particularly relevant and important to your post, you may find it useful to mention it (although if it's not relevant, but you announce it anyway, you might get some gentle "Lo, a man is here to announce his manly opinion" teasing… it's not personal, just a result of people's annoyance at the occasional poster bringing up being male when it's not relevant and there haven't been any assumptions it's necessary to correct, and in a way that makes it look like he thinks it gives his opinion extra importance).

You might be better starting a new thread to discuss your experience, as this is quite an old one. But what I would say is that it sounds like Healthy Minds is your local primary care talking therapy service, and the GP was trying to suggest you self-refer to them.

Despite the wafty name, if they're the kind of service I think they are, they probably offer both group and individual talking therapy (often CBT-based, but sometimes also other modalities), guided self-help, individual counselling, and maybe things like mindfulness, psychoeducation groups, activity groups, or other types of help.

Why not give it a go? It might be better than you anticipate. Or it might not, but then at least you can go back to the GP and say you've tried that, what's next.

I’ve always had this dream that if I won the euromillions jackpot I would use it to open a mental health support centre in my area that had 24/7 crises availability with qualified professionals there, from a psychiatrist to clinical psychologists to mental health nurses, to counsellors, to trained support workers. There would be the crises centre (24/7), then the other part would be normal, average opening hours with workshops, 1:1 or group support/counselling, social support groups, access to resources/other types of therapies, targeting of specific groups - children, adolescents, men, women postpartum, survivors of DA etc etc.

Ah, if only,

*here

Hey, I'm sorry if i'm not supposed to be hear, being male and not a parent.

I just got off the phone with a GP after having a telephone appointment booked when I asked if I could be referred to a therapist or psychiatrist. The doctor didn't even know my history with depression, who I was or even what the call was regarding. Not only did it all feel incredibly uncomfortable, she sounded like she didn't even care. Maybe it was the accent, I don't know.

Anyway, I am supposed to contact "Healthy Minds" and speak to them for some techniques or something. I used to do a bit of meditation in the past, I can tell you that a bit of deep breathing isn't what I was hoping for in terms of treatment for what I feel are some deeper underlying issues.

A relative is in a MH hospital now and whilst the care at home and the expectation on family members to "step up" was awful, i cannot blame the staff, they are pulled in all directions and have severe resource issues.

So we ended up with a situation where the patient was deemed to be sectionable & at risk of harm to themselves and others, left at home with Grand daughter only to provide 24/7///

When eventually a bed found, they have jumped through hoops to avoid a section order because that means they'll be in hospital for far longer, however, its reached such a crisis point where this will now happen.

We ve a family friend over from Australia, he is helping out as he has extensive experience working with the mentally ill over there, they do not have the issues the UK seems to have but as he says, many of the HCPs he works with are ex NHS who have moved there in recent years, one of which is my DD, the numbers leaving the NHS is huge but no one cares.

There's an argument that people recover better in their own home than in hospital, but even back in the late eighties, people generally weren't having psychiatric inpatient treatment unless they really needed to. Home treatment teams visit people at home as a (cheaper) alternative to going into hospital, to check on them and give them drugs. But if you ask anyone who's either been seriously mentally unwell themselves or had a seriously mentally ill loved one, and who has experience of the HTT, it can feel frighteningly inadequate and unsafe, with extreme reluctance to escalate to hospital admission, and an eagerness to discharge from the service. It can also be intrusive and embarrassing having mental health workers visiting your home.

Having experienced the Crisis Team, I’d say they are useless! A different person comes every time, so there’s no continuity of care - the patient has to go over their story and answer the same questions every time. They push drugs, because they can’t offer anything else - which don’t address the problems of complex trauma! They make stupid suggestions such as

“Is there any friend or family, who can help?”

When anyone with some common sense would have asked family or friends for help 10 years ago? Who are you going to ask - frail parents in their 80s and 90s; siblings with MH problems of their own…..People have busy lives of their own these days!

IMO, some people would recover better if they had some peace and quiet; respite from a situation they can’t cope with?

I found it bizarre that professionals like social workers, psychologists, etc wrote report after report about how our family was in an intolerable situation and was likely to implode; but the CMHT refused to give one of our DC any respite from the situation, saying they needed to learn to cope with it - when the literature reports families suffer anxiety, grief, major depressive disorders, post traumatic stress and PTSD. The divorce rate among parents is up to 75%! It was Kafkaesque!

My kids are now under adult services.