"Great Idea Dissapointing Excecution of Services"

I was under the West Cheshire Early Intervention team for around 3 years as is standard. You hear pretty good things about early intervention services for psychosis, however, after increasing exposure to them and other NHS mental health services, I think this is mainly related to the fact that they are the best of a pretty depressingly poor set of options. I have sympathy for staff as they do genuinely seem to mean well but seem to have bought into too many idiotic outdated and stigmatized ideas about mental illness. Despite normally being viewed as a well educated and reasonable human (friends and colleagues words not my own) my concerns have generally been dismissed as being a lack of insight or neurotic. Since being under the service It's cost a fortune and a lot of looking around to locate a professional who finally seems to be on my side and been able to work with long enough to overcome my fears of being open with people after my experience with the NHS. If I had my time again I wish I'd invested in private services from the get-go, sadly the cost of private makes it almost impossible for most to access. We need an absolute overhall of mental health services desperately in this country and better social welfare systems to properly protect and aid people with severe levels of mental distress to live fulfilling and productive lives. Not the current system that overall is less helpful and more coercive, belittling, dismissive or simple just oversimplifies very complex issues and throws a sedative at you to shut you up.

There were some reasonable therapy options but I felt sometimes things that I expressed there were then passed back to nursing clinicians who would take what had been said out of context and twist it to imply I was stupid. I regret being so open and honest with the service and naive enough to think they genuinely would behave in my best interests. Despite supposedly aiming to work collaboratively with patients under their care I had to ask huge numbers of questions to obtain only a vague idea of what diagnosis they had given me. I had to repeatedly request copies of letters I was entitled to and frequently this was still ignored. Despite this sort of behaviour mental health professionals wonder why those of us who access the services don't always trust them..... It's a great idea to try and have a service that allows for continuity with clinicians, like this service I think tries to allow, but in practice, even that didn't happen for me... Hopefully one day individuals who are distressed enough to require these sorts of services will be given the care respect and dignity they deserve. in the short term, I just hope my recurrent nightmares about the way they handled me stop.