"Poor experience of Mental Health support"

I am writing  about my treatment in the emergency department in January 2021, specifically regarding  a mental health liaison nurse. It appears that there is not a single name for the service they worked for, and may be recorded as The Department of Psychological Medicine, The Department of Psychiatric Medicine or the Rapid Response Mental Health Liaison team.

At that time I was suicidal and resolved to end my life. I called an ambulance twice. The first was because when you are suicidal you are supposed to call the emergency services for help. After sitting on my doorstep waiting for an ambulance to come, I realised the emergency services weren’t sending help and I swallowed every pill I had. The suicide attempt was unsuccessful, and after regaining a degree of consciousness I called the ambulance again from the doorstep. I was taken to the QMC Emergency department, where I was eventually seen by a member of staff from the DPM who refused to believe I was suicidal.

In the letter to my GP they wrote that I denied that calling an ambulance was a way of saying I wanted to live and that I called an ambulance twice but denied that this was because I did not want to end my life.

DPM staff do not get to decide whether a person is in denial about self-harm or suicide, and this is only more true when that person has a black eye, has just completed a suicide attempt and physically self-harms in front of you. If I was suicidal enough to overdose, I was suicidal enough to end my life. This should not need to be explained.

I entered that room to be assessed as someone who was suicidal, experiencing psychosis, depression, anxiety, PTSD and ADHD. I was struggling desperately, I felt completely alone, vulnerable and was in shock from having to live through a suicide attempt.

The staff member did not record the advice they gave, but they advised me that there was a button inside me that is called change and all I needed to do was to push that button.

I struggle to find the words to emphasise how dangerous and offensive such a statement is. It was a deeply traumatising moment. I was at my most vulnerable and they told me, literally and explicitly, in their role as a mental health nurse, to simply be different. They not only failed to be open minded and compassionate, they  didn’t try. It's a casebook example of failure.

They recorded that I said I was experiencing psychosis, and recorded 13 times (by my count) that I showed symptoms of psychosis, including paranoia, hearing hallucinations of people talking and having sex, and yet did not detect this (“this” being my psychosis). Another sign that might have indicated that I was experiencing psychosis is that I was taking  an anti-psychotic medication. They should have been able to figure out that swallowing a months worth of anti-psychotic medication and antidepressants could have had a dampening effect on the presentation of my psychosis, but it seems this did not occur to them.

I could go on, and have done in my complaint to PALS, but to summarise, I believe it is a critical failure of the staff member to fail to recognise all of the information described above. But most importantly of all, they didn’t believe me when I said I was experiencing psychosis and was suicidal. If patients are treated with this much suspicion then it will be impossible for any therapeutic process to even begin.

The staff member also recorded that I  left the assessment prematurely after slapping myself in the face a couple of times and that this was not unusual behaviour for me and that I had admitted to doing this occasionally and there was a bruise developing over my right eye from where I punched himself  a couple of days ago. I find the very idea that a member of the DPM would describe witnessing self-harm during an assessment of someones mental health as “not unusual” is absurd and abhorrent.

I feel the DPM is the problem as well

In the publicly available record of inquest into the death of a patient the assistant coroner found several failings in the DPM’s care, including:

a) The DPM record keeping was not up to standard and omitted important pieces of information

b) The risk assessment should always be completed in full by asking directly about risk to others

While this episode is shocking, it is not surprising to me as three months afterwards, I found they treated me the same way  with the same negligence, incompetence and contempt. What’s more, I had already experienced this once before, during a suicidal episode in 2017, when I almost hung myself. I believe the DPM has a pattern of negligent behaviour, incompetence and contempt towards patients in crisis. I have no faith in the DPM or its staff to treat its patients compassionately, professionally, or competently.