Before I write my speech, I just want to add that I have never written a speech before or done any public speaking. Today (3rd November 2015) I spoke in front of approximately 250 people including the Chief Executive of Mind.

It is not often I am proud of myself but today I was, I’m going to allow myself that. So here’s my speech:

Please excuse my nerves. When I bare my soul to my blog, the audience is faceless but I stand in front of you today to explain how I got here. It’s a big deal to talk to so many faces as over the last 12 months or more; I have been turned away countless times by so called health professionals. I’ve doubted myself and wondered whether my illness was just my imagination.
I stand here in front of you, quite similarly when I’ve stood in front of people and begged for crisis intervention, my pain is laid bare as it seeps out of the cuts on my arms and the evil claws of suicide has a grip on my mind.
The crisis unit turned me away not once, not twice but many more times. My partner was scared every single day of what he may come home to and he begged for crisis intervention. They didn’t care.
Put yourself in his shoes, not knowing whether your loved one had committed suicide whilst you are at work. My partner lost two jobs because of taking too much time off to care for me. No one else would help.
There was no respite, no compassion and no understanding.
I had one foot in the grave and I felt like the NHS were only too willing to give me the final push into oblivion.
I have had the following comments from Doctors, CPN’s, Social Workers and Crisis teams:
“You can see a Psych doc in 4 days; you will have to not hurt yourself before then”
“Get on with it, we all have to get up in the morning and do things we do not want to do”
“It’s 3 months till therapy starts, there’s nothing we can do, go home”
A Psychiatrist sat there looking through my notes and repeatedly asking me the same questions. I asked why he was asking the same questions and he kept saying he had forgotten what I had said.
I received a letter from the complaints board at Whitchurch, brushing my concerns and complaints under the carpet. They do not agree that there was a lack of care. But my previous G.P had said he feared I would end up another statistic, and that the system would allow me to fall through the net.
There is always conflicting opinions and decisions from the various health professionals. No wonder I feel I am going crazy half the time.
I gave suggestions to the Psychiatrist that one of my G.P’s had said, the Psych told me to stop being ridiculous. One doc took me off meds after 17 years, two weeks later another doc put me back onto meds.
The Primary Mental Health Care Unit agreed that the Links Centre in Cardiff had failed in their duty of care. But still….. no one listened. I got nowhere.
I have nowhere to turn in times of mental distress and crisis. I get scared and I genuinely fear for my life. I’ve got nowhere to go to be safe as I get turned away. One day it may get too far and it will be too late for me. I don’t want that for future sufferers.
Why should mental health patients have to resort to calling the Police to spend the night in a cell. I have had to be escorted to my GP surgery before and the Police had to demand a GP to urgently see me because the surgery would not take me seriously. It was embarrassing to be walking through reception with Police Officers. I felt like a criminal, and the last time I checked, I certainly am not one. I am just a person with an illness.
The mental health sector desperately needs places of respite with staff who are compassionate and caring and have the appropriate training. I am fed up of staff who are patronising and condescending.
The suicide stats are rising, not falling and there is no time left to ask why. Suicide and self harm is soul destroying and painful, not just physically but emotionally. It’s so undignified to beg for help. But beg I have had to over the last 18 years. I have lost count of the GP’s I have seen, rude offending Psychiatrists and crisis team staff who really don’t have a clue.
I’ve seen people destroyed by the system and sadly some of them are no longer with us. So I am doing this for them too so that their deaths are not in vain. I blame no one but the system that has failed them. Please help change this.
In June, I started my online blog, Handbags & Heartbreak which documents life with Borderline Personality Disorder and Clinical Depression. It highlights the lows and the highs and the daily battle. Strangers come to me in despair asking for help and advice because their own GP’s have turned them away. They don’t know where to turn next. This should not be happening. Why are people being left to suffer in silence? For example, a male friend of mine in Gloucestershire was told by his mental health nurse not to tell anyone about his recent mental health diagnosis as he would be thought differently about. And then we wonder where stigma comes from, the very thing that we fight against.
The feedback from people from my blog has been overwhelming. It has been an eye opener to how people are being treated and also how their partner’s feel as it’s not just mental health patients that contact me but also people that live with sufferers. There is no support for the partners either and because they end up as the main carer, don’t they deserve respite and consideration as well.
Mental health is the silent killer but I refuse to be silent about the lack of care for mental health sufferers. I live with this ticking time bomb inside my mind, and I would like to minimalize the casualties when I explode which so often happens when I can’t cope with what’s going on inside me.
If crisis care does not improve, we will continue to see more people take their lives. You have to consider how you would feel if this was presented to you by your own loved one. We cannot continue to be treated like strangers with no feelings. We have feelings as well, even if they misplaced at times because of the devil that takes over in the mind.
It’s been a really long journey and at this moment in time, I don’t see it getting any shorter because no one seems to realise just how important is to provide mental health patients with immediate treatment or crisis care. I have not had a satisfactory answer as to why I have been declined a CPN and other urgent treatments as recommended by my previous G.P and The Primary Mental Health Support Unit. The response letter I had to my complaints about the NHS is not acceptable and does not justify the lack of care I have had.
I first started being ill in 1997. Its now 2015 and I am still battling for help. 18 years. 18 long years. I never know when my breakdowns are going to happen, they come without warning. I know that if and when the next one happens, I have nowhere to turn to. My G.P surgery won’t help, The Links Centre won’t help and the crisis team at Whitchurch have said there is not enough resources to help.
It has got to a stage that patients literally have to seriously harm themselves or someone else, for anyone to pay any attention. You have to be half dead. Why is this acceptable. I know of a young lady who smashed her head on the corner of an oven so that the crisis team would admit her and keep her safe. Prior to that, they weren’t interested.
I have been sober and drug free now over 4 years. I had to do that on my own as well. I didn’t get any help with that.
I have never been offered support for self harm or after care.
I have never been offered a support plan.
It has come down to my employer to pay for private counselling. Why should they be picking up the slack where the NHS has failed.
I am sure you can understand my frustration, my upset, my bitterness and the hurt I am feeling.
There desperately needs to be places where mental health patients can go for rest and to feel safe. It is unfair to expect their loved ones to have to keep dealing with it all.
Back when mental health wasn’t understood, people were put away in hospitals and treated terribly and like an outcast. They were put away and forgotten about. These days, people are not treated at all, and just forgotten about. Everyone deserves quality of life and why should we have to beg for this.
It’s the hardest thing to wake up and fight a battle no one can see until you fall asleep again. It’s hard to smile and pretend it’s all okay, like it doesn’t hurt. But it does and we need your help.
Thank you for listening.