"It feels like they're not interested in helping"

After years of suffering mental health issues, I finally plucked up the courage to go and ask for help. My GP assessed me and referred me on. The first disappointment was that they do not make any distinction between GP pre-assessed / referred patients and self-assessed patients. I thought if I talked to the GP first, they could verify my need for help (which they did) and speed up the process, but no: It has been over a month now since my initial assessment talk with TalkWandsworth and I have received absolutely no reaction after my assessment call despite calling multiple times and being told someone would get in touch. Meanwhile, I am suffering here, counting the hours until I get help. I am quite sure they do not care at all about the distress they are causing me.

As for the assessment: that was one of the most humiliating experiences I ever had, worse than a pelvic exam. I felt that the staff member I spoke to showed absolutely no compassion or empathy whatsoever, robotically asking me questions, some of them extremely intrusive and irrelevant and not listening to my answers. They sounded like a disinterested intern not trained to do such a delicate job, and nobody will convince me that this was a qualified 'clinician'. It felt that the person did not care that I was struggling for composure during the interrogation. They did not read between the lines of my statements or ask follow-up questions, thereby missing info that I only thought about later. Besides, I quite frankly was not comfortable admitting some things to a total stranger who sounded completely disinterested in my pain or discuss intimate details of my mental state with someone I couldn't even see... And even though I kept reminding them, they just didn't speak into her headset either so, on top of everything, I was constantly struggling to understand their queries, making me ask for repetitions every other sentence. It felt lie they couldn't even be bothered to wear their headset properly.

To sum it up, the ham-handedness and complete lack of empathy made for a traumatising interrogation experience further damaging my self-esteem. Well, I thought, at least I'll get help now, but no. Going by the futile wait for a reaction, I cannot expect any help at all. Meanwhile, a month has passed and I feel worse than ever. For me, that's an eternity.