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

To treat or not to treat - that is the question

So what happens when you're to scared to call for help as you don't know where you'll end up?

This, from one of our contributors today.

Things haven't been so good lately.  I'm finding it harder and harder to cope.

I can't sleep, but then when I sleep, I can't wake up.
I can't concentrate on anything other than making plans to end it all.

But I don't want to call for help.  What are my options?  There are no options.

The Crisis team?  What can they do anyway?  Tell you off if you call them instead of the CCTT when you aren't sure which number to ring.  Have a magical bath of healing. Distract yourself.  End up feeling worse than before you called.

So you're offered hospital, but I have no idea where will I end up. 

• Burnley, which by all accounts is hell on earth.
• Blackpool, which has a great reputation, but only next to Burnley.
• Chorley, miles away from my family and too far for them to visit.
• Ormskirk?   I'm not even sure where the hell Ormskirk is.
• Some private hospital somewhere? Not local, Manchester? Further?

I don't want to be sent miles away.  I just don't.  Knowing there's fuck all chance of being close to home, desperate to get out.  That's not healing.  That's not the environment you can get better in.

So I'm not calling for support as it's pointless. There's no point in calling for support when there's none, is there.  If I ask for support and end up hospitalised then I'm screwed.

I give in.  I really do. There's no help and no where to turn to.

Thanks LCFT.  Thank you very much for taking away my local hospital.  Thank you for screwing me over just because I'm a woman.  Thanks for screwing over your own bed capacity to my loss.

Thanks for nothing.

Is Everything in Crisis?

Twitter has been full of tweets under #crisisteamfail.  Turns out that the hashtag was started by someone under the care of Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust.

Someone, it turns out, who has children who is being treated 90 mins from her home as there's no beds in The Orchard for women.  Someone who is experiencing first hand the problems with being so far away from home.  Little contact with their family, no one to come and visit and all the rest.  All of the things that the Trust deny are a problem.

Someone who started #crisisteamfail because of her experiences of Home Treatment at the hands of the LCFT, the care, that we're told by the Trust is so much better for us women.  As @orchardbeds chatted with this woman another tweep joined in and low and behold, turns out it's the same Crisis team as the other two.

There's no saying that the whole of the Crisis team in North Lancashire isn't up to par and some names have come out as providing really good care, but there's certainly enough examples of problems to make us sit up and take notice.

They all had experience of poor treatment at the hands of the teams that's meant to care for you when you're at your worst.  And that's what the women of North Lancashire are left with.

Miles away from home if you need inpatient care and a crisis team that spawned a #crisisteamfail hashtag.

Fingers crossed you don't get ill ladies!