Mental Health Awareness Day | BREXIT | Boogie Woogie dancing

I sometimes look very angry when I attend the MDT meetings for my daughter.  She is Learning Disabled and has been repeatedly Sectioned under the Mental Health Act – currently a Section 3 order that I have had to take legal advice to even question (and I thank national MENCAP for very essential advisory support). 

MDT is a ‘Multi-Disciplinary Team’ meeting – NHS staff from the ward, Psychiatrists, Psychologists, Social Workers etc. I have been to so many, I speak the lingo.

Sectioned means being held in a secure ward. MHA Section 3 is a 6 month order.  You are not free to leave, your family can not take you home, or even off the ward to the café without the written permission of the Psychiatrist.  

The Psychiatrist is usually not available on week-ends so all leave has to be pre-planned rather than responsive to situation or need (so if your daughter calls to say can we just go out because I feel like a bit of time-out and it would help me...you can't). The Psychiatrist prescribes anti-psychotic drugs that ‘moderate her moods’; she is not psychotic, she is not actually even ill. She is sometimes restrained ie physically held.  She says has been held face down and injected sometimes.  

My daughter is not mentally ill. This is an accepted fact by the Psychiatrist and the other staff. She does get anxious, stressed, depressed, which are all mental health issues but not such that she should be hospitalised. Her stress is related to her frustration about her disability – she is not really free to make decisions about her life in the way that others of her age (21) make, including making the decision to move out from living with her middle-aged dad. Her chances of getting a job are minimal. Friendships are hard to form, young people are busy with their lives and social relationships and sexual growth, learning disabled friends are not so easy….

This is all stressful for her. Most of the time she is lovely, people like her, she is charming and really quite able. Sometimes she boils over and runs off or screams and shouts for hours, or goes into a black mood and refuses to eat until she becomes ill. Because she is vulnerable I can not just let her run off so the police are called and they take her to the hospital under their Section 136 powers – and if she is not amenable to coming home the NHS Section her as a ‘place of safety’ issue.

She has been asking to live somewhere independently (with support) for some time but the Social Services have nothing available. So she gets stressed and anxious and depressed. She can be quite difficult to manage when she is these things. Even when she isn’t she is quite demanding and needy. This is not her fault – she just needs a lot of support; she has a disability, a mental disability, she got dealt some cards that are not easy. Her disability is a strange mix of bright insightful loving empathetic daughter and non-cognitive vulnerability - as we walk out into the bright sun she turns to me and says "do i need sunglasses dad?", she nearly always asks this. In the absence of enough support she sometimes becomes more and more difficult, this is very stressful to live with. When she boils over it really ruins your day, weekend, week, month…all depending on how long it goes on for.

I think that when I become angry in MDT meetings I look like I have Mental Health issues myself.  When her destabilised moods that are the result of her understandable dissatisfaction with her lot go on for weeks I do find that I go from stressed to depressed – as a strong person in a position of responsibility professionally I find this difficult to even admit to. Ordinary things become less joyful, work becomes a demand rather than the wonderful thing it is (I am privileged to have a job that is rewarding and brilliant), holding it together becomes a challenge.

What makes me angry is that much of what is happening is not impossible to solve. Everyone in the room knows it. It is just totally, utterly, despicably under-resourced.

Off the record the staff talk to me. I apologise for seeming to be angry with them. It is clear from all the staff that this is an endemic issue, they are fire-fighting rather than being the long-term solution that they wish to be and that they signed up to. It is also clear that we are an average case, that this has become the norm.

We fail our people – including our disabled people - so badly that they become Mental Health patients because the education system, the social care system, the NHS, the economy, is simply not set up for building a better and caring society. The economic system is about winning and competition, promoting wealth and success, and if you are not capable of being part of the competitive system the statutory services are simply a net to catch the failures - and the net is full of holes.

And then we come to the current obsessions – BREXIT, taking our country back, populism, nationalism.

And I think – what has this political jive and Kuenssberg ego dance and Daily Mail quick step and Farage goose step got to do with how we care for our people? The DJ has filled the room full of smoke and we are fed by the drug of the nation – TV – and the promise that a wealthier country (or a wealthier small proportion of it) will somehow change the groove to a conga chain where we all benefit in a mutual drunken bounce-fest. What utter foolish nonsense, the club is owned by people who make Peter Stringfellow look like an emancipated feminist who is only in the business to make people happy and doesn’t care about personal benefit a jot. Does anyone really believe it?

Europe doesn’t stop us from looking after people. Europe doesn’t make us ignore our ill, our mental health issues, our disabled. 

We do.