Can you keep yourself safe? An adventure with Crisis.

Can you keep yourself safe?

So there's no local care.  We know about this and at least two people yesterday who are following this campaign have been deterred from seeking help because they are scared of what will happen. 

Fear.  Fear is a bad thing when you are already fearful, or perhaps not thinking rationally, or seeing every small set back as a huge challenge that can't be overcome.  Catastrophising.  Every little thing lending weight to the idea sat in your head that life isn't worth living and you'd be better off dead.

In steps the Crisis Team.

Except there's not many people in the Crisis team, and personal experiences shared by Service Users expose the huge disparity of the care given by individual members. 

If you have a crisis in the middle of the night, you need to vie to speak to the lone worker who is covering all of the area.  On other nights you find yourself being transferred to the lone worker sat in another area of the Trust, miles away.  What can they do?  Not much.


But surely you will get a sympathetic response?  Not always.

"What do you want me to do about it?"

"Was it you calling over and over again when I was on another call?  We do have other people you know".

So you end up feeling worse, like you're wasting their time.  Like you're even more nothing than you were before.  This makes the usual "what can you do to distract yourself" and "What has helped before when you've felt like this." seem benign, although generally very unhelpful.

Then you have the assessment of risk, except if you don't fit nicely into their check-sheet for risk then you're not as likely to be taken seriously to get help.  You have a mental illness - fine.  Not a man of a low socioeconomic background who lives alone?  Well why aren't you organising your own help then?

Because its that easy, isn't it.

Then you have the pejorative way in which some members of the team treat people who even have a whiff of a note of "personality disorder" against them - or worse, when someone in the team decides you have a PD despite there being no such pathology in any report.

They can't really mean it, they're manipulative and attention seeking. Missing the point that each case needs to be taken on its own merit.

Then the last question - Can you keep yourself safe?

Well no, no I don't think I can, that's why I am calling you, but by calling, you dismiss the sincerity of what I am saying because I've called you.

Can you keep yourself safe?  You better be able to as there's no help to be found.

#crisisteamfail