"Lack of access to my medication"

Last week I received a letter from my CPN cancelling my next appointment. In this letter they made no arrangements for me to access my medication - they usually bring me my medication to my appointments.

To give this some context, I have no support. I am at crisis point. I am struggling enormously with trying to stop myself from taking my own life. The city crisis team won’t work with me because I didn’t ‘sound’ distressed enough on the phone to them. As an aside it might be useful if the crisis team could produce guidance on how they expect ‘crisis’ to be performed for them. I do not understand why they would think I am lying but if there are specific words or actions that would have convinced them of my need, that would be useful information. I don’t understand how they have made an assessment based on what I sound like and suspect this is essentially a biased assessment that I failed due to not being neurotypical (When i said this to the person on the phone I was told this wasn’t true as they had spoken very clearly. Their speech was not the issue, it was the capacity to listen, understand  and make an assessment, which is clearly flawed as they were essentially telling me I was lying when I was not).

In this context my medication is the only thing I have that helps me cope.

I have phoned the team every day this week asking how I can get my medication. Duty have consistently told me my CPN will be in touch, but this has not happened.

This situation is obviously impacting negatively on an already difficult situation as I do not know if I will have access to the only thing left to me to help me stay alive.

It’s not fair to not only have nothing to offer me when I am struggling to keep myself alive but also to make this situation worse through lack of communication and putting me in a situation where I don’t even know if I can have my medication. This means I don’t know if my current very difficult mental state is going to get worse through not being able to manage it with medication like I usually do. This kind of uncertainty is not conducive to good mental health.

This is the second time recently that my medication has been messed about with. Last time I had to request it very many times over a number of weeks and then ask a social worker to request it ( more than once. They refused my social workers request the first time too. I have never been told the reason for this, just that I can complain if I want to. I don’t want to complain, I just would like my medication).  I had weeks without medication and given the complete lack of any other support offered it’s not fair to just randomly withhold the one thing I have that helps me cope.

Fortunately while writing this my GP has returned my emergency request for a phone call and agreed to prescribe me a weeks worth of my medication while I continue to attempt to make contact with my mental health team. Hopefully this will be enough time, it took far longer than a week last time they randomly withdrew my medication.