MNHQ here: fancy having a play with a new NHS-approved tool for mental health support?

[RowanMumsnet]

Hello,

We've been asked if Mumsnet users would be willing to check out a new NHS-approved tool for mental health support and give some feedback on it - and let us know whether you'd like to see it featured in relevant Talk and content areas across Mumsnet.

You can find it here: it's called Good Thinking and aims to help people find tools and resources to support their mental wellbeing. At the moment some of the resources are a bit biased towards London and the southeast, because the tool has been supported by the Mayor of London's office as well as the NHS, but the aim is to add more national resources over time.

The makers of the tool want to know whether it would be a useful thing to feature on Mumsnet in relevant topics and content areas, so we're throwing it over to you. Would it be a useful addition to the site?

Any feedback or thoughts let us know - and if you have any questions for the developers we'll try to get them answered for you.

Thanks
MNHQ

I answered questions about trouble sleeping. The first few responses seemed reasonable but then it ended up directing me to Reddit and Quora! It made me question how accurate and well-researched the NHS advice is if it considers Reddit to be a reputable source of support.

This didn’t result in anything at all useful for me.

I’m struggling with suicidal thoughts, serious self harm (that regularly requires treatment in A&E), an eating disorder and anxiety/ depression.

The self-assessment had me answering a ton of questions about my bladder control, about how serious my pain is (even though I don’t have a condition causing pain) and then many questions on alcohol use. There were almost no questions relating to my self-harm, eating disorder, anxiety or depression.

I answered everything honestly, at the dvd it said to book a GP appointment because of my ‘possible alcohol misuse’ - I go out after work on a Friday night and usually have 3-4 drinks but I don’t drink any other alcohol during the week. No recognition of any of the things I actual struggle with being picked up by the assessment.

I tried to find services using the front page tool too and out of the 5 services recommended to me 3 were for people aged under 25 and one was aimed at men. They weren’t all available in my area either.

The concept for this is good but the execution is beyond awful and extremely frustrating to go through all those questions to be completely mis-signposted. I think this would cause more damage than good if I was turning to this in a crisis.

I thought it was all a bit strange to be honest and not helpful at all.

I think it’s absolutely brilliant. Straight forward and easy to use. It directed me to resources I had no idea existed. An exciting step towards improving mental health services.
It will be better when not so London based and has resources geared towards where the user is based.

So I tried the anxiety tab...It was easy to navigate..I wasnt really sure about tje symptom checker part..it seemed very basic/had missed out many symptoms and the marker of avoidnace being 'I dont leave the house' is pretty strong, it didnt feel like it was written by psychotherapists, I was really suprised that the first option on 'would you like to try something?' was "paid"...free I had to scroll to get to. I selected with a professional expecting it to suggest IAPT services..but instead what was suggested was a YouTube yoga channel...An under 25s charity, a mens charity..it all seemed pretty random...Those things seemed to be basically well being not the actual treatment of anxiety....With the paid option so prominent it made me feel like the site was more of an advertising platform than a support service..The wellbeing links are useful but seem out of context for someone asking fir professional help.

Having used the app I found out that I can self refer to my local mental health service, which I didn't previously know.

Apart from that, the assessment bit is absolute rubbish. I have severe depression, anxiety and cPTSD, diagnosed by a mental health professional.

So, having answered many of the multiple choice questions about mental health it then carried on asking me endless questions about urination difficulties. On and on and on.... Really annoying, and if I'd been in a lower mood at the time it could have tipped me over the edge. I was looking for help and reassurance about my mental health, not the ability to wee!

Potentially a really dangerous app!

I should add that I do actually have a chronic lifelong bladder/kidney problem for which I am seeing a specialist for. So it just felt like my serious mental health difficulties were being minimised and I needed to concentrate on my physical problems and not my mental health. And at the moment my mental health is probably more life threatening. As I said, this is a very dangerous app!

Clunky the sideways scrolling took me a while to work out.

Just points to 3rd party resources, so when the sell is “tools to help you” it’s a total oversell which made me switch off straight away. Typical of a government site, lots of promise but not straightforward and ultimately there are better options for digital tools out there and if I need help then GP is better, do a bit “what’s the points?”

Plus you need to be able to narrow down the options as simply selecting from those given meant I could only get help if I was a man, under 35, gay or affected by a very specific terror attack

I'm not a fan of the sideways scrolling either.

The depression self-assessment asks 'what is your gender?' when it should be 'what is your sex?' I don't have a gender and it wouldn't let me leave it blank.

I'm not currently depressed but filled it in as if I were answering a few years ago when I was. It told me to go to A&E because of thoughts of self-harm, which would have been extremely unhelpful. It needs to be able to differentiate between someone who is actively suicidal or thinking of severely harming themselves, and self-harm as a maladaptive coping mechanism.

There were also a lot of questions and the interface would be better if more of them were on one page instead of constantly having to click 'next' - it feels like one of those sites where they want you to reload the page numerous times for ad impression revenue.

Who doesn't wake in the night to wee???? Or, who doesn't wee when they wake in the night???

I got pulled down the urinary path as well, told to go to A&E. Appeared to be related to ticking the box that I wee at night.

Also, kept answering a question that said something along the lines of "Do you feel unwell" with "No", immediately followed by "when did your symptoms start" - what symptoms, of what? I just said I wasn't unwell. This tended to bring me down the urinary path, too.

Sleep advice also unhelpful - my problem isn't getting to sleep (which it should know because I said I fall asleep within 15 minutes and that my problem was waking too early), but it then told me I needed more sleep and provided all the standard advice about what to do before bed to help fall asleep faster, plus just "get more sleep".

I've never woken at night to wee.

I’ve been off work for 9 months because my daughter has a life threatening illness.
I had ssp up until last week & now it’s going fully over to universal credit.
I had to attend a work capability assessment a few weeks ago and they’re saying I’m fit for work, even though my child isn’t attending school and is still extremely poorly.
To dispute this they’ve said I need to provide further evidence to support my claim for being off sick.
I’m at a loss, I’m already under an immense amount of stress and my GP agrees I’m in no fit state to return to work at this point.
Any advice on what I can do or what evidence I could give that may help my case?
Sorry for long message just feeling helpless 😞

Hi Teresac75

So sorry to hear this - it sounds incredibly stressful and upsetting. If you start a discussion thread in our Money Matters topic or our mental health topic, hopefully some other MNers will be able to give you some good advice. We really hope you get good news about your daughter's health and that things start to look up for you soon.

@Teresac75

I’ve been off work for 9 months because my daughter has a life threatening illness. I had ssp up until last week & now it’s going fully over to universal credit. I had to attend a work capability assessment a few weeks ago and they’re saying I’m fit for work, even though my child isn’t attending school and is still extremely poorly. To dispute this they’ve said I need to provide further evidence to support my claim for being off sick. I’m at a loss, I’m already under an immense amount of stress and my GP agrees I’m in no fit state to return to work at this point. Any advice on what I can do or what evidence I could give that may help my case? Sorry for long message just feeling helpless 😞

Like the selection of apps suggested to help manage my anxiety. (Currently pretty well managed using anti-depressants).

However, I did the anxiety self assessment and it recommended that I spoke to a doctor in the next 4 hours or called 111 as "possible new onset psychosis".

This is an alarming thing to read and could really panic someone...I know that I do not have any form of psychosis and cannot work out which of my answers would've lead to this diagnosis.

My mental health is well managed through medication and lots of practical self-care activities so that didn't panic me, however, it is something that I could imagine might have really worries me when I was really ill last year.

I don't like it. It just tells me I need to see a GP or mental health professional immediately. I could have told it that! I've been on a waiting list for months and the psychiatrist is fully aware that I intend to end my own life eventually.

You also start off ok but after a few screens you just end up clicking off as it's too much effort and I'm just too tired and fed up to engage with it.

Like thesnap I couldn't be arsed to engage with it. Sorry!

Oh dear.

So I’m not the only one that was lead down the urinary path then?

I have been having trouble sleeping, so thought I’d check out the insomnia stuff. I also wake in the night to wee (have done for years, since having children I think) and I’ve been a bit unwell with a cold (who hasn’t at the moment?)

The tool told me I’m at risk of sepsis due to a urinary infection and to contact 111/ A and E 🤨

I didn’t have time to do the full assessment, so just did the 3 questions for ‘feeling stressed’ or ‘feeling blue’
I can answer more with my thoughts later, but the big one that stood out for me is a simple age and or sex question would help for this quick one to target the suggested places to turn. Out of my top 5 recommended, 3 weren’t suitable because they were for under 25s or just for men. Samaritans and mind were the only ones that would have been useful...
It seems just like a broker for mental health support tbh, but I’ll fully explore the site later for a more in-depth view (I have severe and diagnosed mental health issues so will be interested to see how that works with this site and what is recommended - ie how useful will it be at crisis points?) .

I can't see any obvious options for people experiencing psychosis - eg "I am or I know someone who is hearing voices/severely paranoid/behaving strangely"

All of the many new initiatives around mental health seem to be aimed at the less severe, less stigmatised forms of mental illness.

God knows, we do need more support for these. But the relative silence around schizophrenia and other severe mental health problems just adds to the marginalisation and lack of understanding for the many people that suffer from them. One in a hundred people has schizophrenia.

I'm also surprised that there is no option to seek support with alcohol/drug abuse, since this is quite likely to be a part of how mental illness is manifesting in many people's lives.

Having dug into the tool a bit more, another thing that worries me is that once you get to the support resources it offers, it is clearly not the right pathway for people to seek help with mental illness. It is more like a resource for people who want to improve their mental health, more like a gym than a hospital.

It is a lifestyle tool for people who don't feel great but want to feel better. My heart contracted with despair when I saw what was on offer and imagined how I would feel if I was in crisis and seeking genuine NHS support.

I wish that all of the current movements towards speaking more about mental health, and listening more, supporting more, would come clean about the distinction between lifestyle initiatives on the one hand and the utterly desperate and catastrophically unmet need for properly funded NHS treatment.

For people with cancer we provide social support, healthy eating advice, exercise initiatives, self-help tools etc -- but we provide these as an add-on; we don't use them to cast a cloak over a refusal to provide the nuts and bolts NHS treatments that are the core of the response to cancer.

Calling this tool 'NHS-approved' is misleading, because it gives ill people the false hope that it is a pathway to actually getting the specialist help they need.

Sorry about the posting marathon, but I've just noticed the MN request for feedback about whether the tool should be featured across the site. I'm neutral about that - it isn't better than other similar tools, especially since it is London-centric.

What I would love to see on mumsnet is some content related to severe mental illness, perhaps aimed at parents of young people who are developing psychosis. Schizophrenia and psychosis are stonkingly common, and yet, typically, parents who encounter it in their children are utterly unprepared because it just isn't on the 'parental landscape' in the way that other serious conditions - eg autism - are. We should be prepared, we should have more understanding.

(I would be glad to write an anonymous piece for MN about parenting a young person with serious mental illness.)