"Discrimination"

I was with the mental health services in Enfield for many years in the past but did not find them very helpful at all. As far as I am concerned I was with them because of suffering with quite serious mental health problems for many years in my life. My description of these problems would be depression, anxiety and PTSD. However a long time ago when I was 13 years old I was also diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome too, which is something that I have always had doubts about as it never seemed to sit right with me (or at least not in the way that people seemed to assume that I was affected by it). 

So when I was under these services they kept treating me as though this label was true and trying to push treatment on me for it which I could not accept or go along with as I felt that this would have been the wrong support for me as I was trying to get help for the mental health issues that I was experiencing. However they never seemed to really listen to me about this (even though they would pretend to) as they would just carry on acting in the same way and treating me in a way which if anything had more of a harmful effect on my mental wellbeing, and then in the end they just seemed to write me of as being a difficult personality and dropped me altogether because I would not agree with them, even though all I ever really wanted was to get the right sort of support to help me to recover more and always did my best to act well.   

I think that when you have a label such as this though and people are aware of it then they make judgements about you based upon that, and then also start assuming things about you that are not really real. So if you are suffering from anxiety and things whilst you are around them then they end up making judgments about you based only on the surface appearance of things, and then assume that you are really like that because you have some sort of learning disability or are mentally handicapped in some way where you do not understand things, and then they feel that they have to start acting in a strange way around you without really getting to know you properly first or understanding the true reasons why you are like that.

It is as though they like to put everything into nice easy boxes for themselves and assume that they know better about things because they have some sort of title or qualification. Plus they would also listen to my parents a lot who called them up and sometimes even pass on information about me to them, even though I had tried explaining to them that my relationship with them had been bad for my mental wellbeing over the years due to the problems that they also have.   

In fact I am not even saying that I am not affected by this condition in some way or that I am not on that spectrum at all (as many people probably are). But all I know is that even if this label of aspergers syndrome was true in some way then it would still not be true in the same way that people have seemed to assume that I am affected by it and the assumptions that they have made based around that. Since I do think that there is quite a lot of stigma and discrimination out there to do with a person’s mental state or the way that their brain is working, and in my experiences the mental health services in Enfield are certainly no exception to this either even though they might like to hide behind a phoney image and pretend to be something different.

So much so that it has even left me feeling quite bad for people who actually are affected by this condition or affected by it more acutely, because I know from my own treatment the amount of judgment and discrimination that they must have to endure.    I was discharged from the mental health services a long time ago and since then I have developed a physical problem with my body due to the mental illness eventually taking its toll on me, which I have found to be difficult to live with. I have been trying to work through my mental health issues for a long time by myself after I realised that I was not going to get any help from the services and gave up on them, but my physical problem has also made them a lot worse (and perhaps may not have even developed it in the first place if the service had been better).

So I reluctantly tried to get a referred back to the mental health services because I was struggling so much with things but every time they just ignored me and never got back in touch. Until I ended up calling the NHS helpline again on the last occasion that I tried and I was referred to the Crisis Team who arranged a meeting with me.   I met a man and a woman at the meeting and I think that one of them  was supposed to be a psychologist or something (although I wasn’t convinced) and I sat there for quite a long time explaining things to them and talking about previous experiences as well as things that I had been through in my life that I felt had caused me to have these types of problems, and they also asked me quite a few personal questions too including to do with incidents of sexual assault that I had happened to me whilst they wrote loads of stuff down on paper.

But then after all of this they just seemed to completely ignore everything that I had said to them and one of them told me that they saw aspergers in my, despite the fact that they had only just met me and that they were also not qualified in that area as far as I am aware to make such a diagnosis. So it then became apparent to me that this was probably the idea that they had in mind before the meeting had even taken place and also the outcome that they had already planned and wanted to happen, and that the whole thing had really just been a bit of an act as they still had the same ideas about me that other people had from all those years ago. Even though it is apparently not even that uncommon for the effects of trauma to sometimes be mistaken as part of the autistic spectrum anyway, and I also had a scarf over my mouth because of the pandemic so they couldn’t even see my expressions properly.  

They did not give me the referral that I wanted but instead wanted me to go to another organisation that specialises with autism so that I can get reassessed, even though I explained to them that I was not in a position to do this right now because of the problems in my life as it could mean that I loose benefit money that I need to survive which would make my mental health even worse. They even told me that I would not get paid any money for having mental illness although I am not sure if they were speaking the truth or not as everything just seemed to be based around the assumption that I definitely did have this condition and that this would have been confirmed by having such a test.

So I told them that they would do exactly the same thing as me if they were in the same position instead of putting themselves in danger which they disagreed with, even though they could not come up with any alternative solutions. Then after this meeting they closed the door on me and pretty much left me to die again, even after I had told them that I was getting closer to the edge and I ended up leaving that meeting feeling even worse than I did before. Plus I’m not even that sure why having a condition such as aspergers should affect you from getting help for your mental illnesses from that service, or why they would think that they know someone better than they know themselves.    

At this point though I am not even sure if I care that much anymore as I have lost my faith and trust in this service and I can understand why I have heard to many people complain about the Crisis Team and why there are so many bad reviews online about the Enfield Mental Health Service which still doesn’t seem to have changed much. They certainly don’t make it very easy for me to accept myself even if you do have a condition such as aspergers syndrome due to the amount of stigma that they have towards people and the assumptions that they make.

In fact the last social worker that I had with them years ago would even talk with me about a lot of conspiracy theories or aliens and things because they seemed to have an idea that this was the sort of thing that I was into. Even though I think that it is quite obvious that this is not really a very good idea when you are working with vulnerable and mentally ill people who could be suffering from paranoia, and this is probably just one example of the absurd sort of stuff that goes on there.