I’m writing this post twenty four hours after getting out of hospital. I wasn’t in for long, it was just a trip to A&E because I was struggling so much with my own mind that I decided to take a hand full of sedatives and some analgesics to try and stop my head from running over and over again. You can call me selfish if you want. Maybe you think it was reckless and stupid. I agree. In those few hours leading up to popping those pills I didn’t give a fuck what would happen to me. I was in so much pain. Not physically. But I was hearing over and over again these voices in my head screaming out at me that I was less than what I am. All I could think about was how much relief there would be in sleeping through the abuse I was hearing in my head.
My short but eventful time there saw me sleeping through an IV being pumped through my veins to try and bring up my blood pressure. I was then sat in a room whilst I waited for the mental health team. To my left was a gentleman who seemingly had also been battling with his own mind and a ninety year old man called Albert. Albert, to my understanding, had suffered a fall at home and was waiting for transport to take him home. He’d been there all day and was due to leave at six. He left at twenty to eleven, the transport team letting down a sweet old man. To my right was a rather vocal Canadian woman called Patricia. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She was on holiday and had a suspected blood clot...Or maybe it was just an infection. No one told her and she ended up discharging herself.
Now this isn’t me bashing the NHS because I know that times are hard. We’re living under a government that is so out of touch with us lowly people. I’m not smart enough to be up to date with our politics but even I can see that something is failing here. There were people crowding in the hallways, sitting on the floors and holding their own IV bags. When we are sitting like sardines you have to think to yourself...Am I safe?
The answer was no. I wasn’t. If it wasn’t for my mother and boyfriend I believe I would have been potentially admitted to our local mental health ward. I might be crackers but there’s no way that being locked in those four walls would have benefitted me. A bed would have been wasted on me because by morning and some TLC I would have been able to muddle through my days. As I stormed through the hallways of the hospital demanding to be seen by the ‘Crisis Team’ you could overhear people discussing security being called and the cries of ‘THE CHILDREN’.
I don’t give a fuck about your children when I have been cooped up in a gutted out stock room being pumped full of fluids for the past eleven hours. When I can overhear the ‘mental health specialists’ telling the nurse that I will have to wait patiently and they don’t know when they will be able to see me after being told two days prior that I am not a priority for my doctors and nurses I was ready to blow. With a red mist of rage overcoming me, I ran through the emergency corridors screaming at the top of my lungs and flipping chairs and tables.
I didn’t realise I was so strong.
It was like the bottle flip challenge but with cheap furniture. I’ve never looked back on my actions and been so afraid of myself.
I know I’m not alone and I know there are hundreds of people out there who have been let down too. There are people out there who don’t have the support I do. If they had taken the cocktail of pills I did yesterday then they wouldn’t have had the same response I did. Sure, I didn’t take a lethal amount but my blood pressure was low and I was vomiting. Had I been smaller and less knowledgeable of what I was doing (I knew the whole time that I didn’t want to die, I just wanted to silence and trick the voices in my mind) I could have died.
We need to focus on making people more knowledgeable of people who are mentally ill. It’s no use assuming that the specialised mental health teams are there doing the best they can. Okay, they might be. But they lack the resources that they need, they lack the training and some lack the compassion. People who are likely to come in to contact with people who have mental health issues need to not jump to the defense so quickly. They need to learn to cope, to be given the tools on how to minimise the situation. The NHS is struggling, yes but we cannot simply bury our heads and blame everything on the lack of funds because there are still things we can do. We need to be resourceful and use our common sense.
When your nurse has a 5.6% response rate and you have doctors telling you to ‘calm down’ and that you ‘aren’t their priority’, you begin to believe you aren’t worth anything. You start to think that you are more effort than you are worth and that you don’t belong here, on Earth, with the normal people.
I’m so sick of being let down by those who are being paid to help me. I don’t want to see anyone else suffering like me and my family.
1 in 3 people are being diagnosed with depression now. That means that 1 in 3 people are struggling with their emotions, they might not have an outlet or the tools to help them cope. Pills can only do so much but for some people they need more. There’s no cookie cutter that gives you a person who suffers with depression. It could be anyone. You don’t need to be intelligent, stupid, rich or poor. You simply need to be alive.
