Washing of Hands

I share this because of my interest in mental health - I have lots of crazy friends, and may well be crazy myself at some point, who knows. 

Poor Cylene has been going through a hard patch recently, and her anxieties have brought her a variety of dramatic and baroque hallucinations. Artist though she may be, these are not at all easy to deal with and she would sooner not have them.

She tried to call her GP and after 90 minutes trying and failing to get through called her mental health team instead. The MHT recently discharged her, not because she was well, but because she’d been through their offered programme of therapy and that was it. It is in their interest to discharge patients because they are no longer a drain on time and resources, regardless of how far they are towards a cure and what sense ‘cure’ may make in their particular case. The MHT refused to speak to her. ‘We discharged you, you’re not our responsibility, talk to your GP’.

So Cylene again attempted to call her GP and finally got through. ‘I’ll try to contact your prescribing psychiatrist and call you back’, the GP said. When Cylene got that call, two hours later, it began with the doctor ranting for fifteen minutes about the behaviour of the MHT. ‘They refused to speak to me,’ she said. ‘I said, I’m not a random member of the public, I’m a health professional enquiring about one of my patients who you have also treated and who is presenting with psychotic symptoms. It would really help me to speak to her psychiatrist. They simply just kept saying that you’d been discharged and weren’t their responsibility any more. In the absence of consulting your psychiatrist, all we can advise is that you take another 25mg of your current antipsychotic.’

‘So I said thank you, as I knew that’s all she could do’, sighed Cylene. ‘But I’m already taking 300mg, I don’t see what another 25 will do. If I could get more than 2 hours’ sleep a night it would help.’