Sarah Chisnall is a Scottish public affairs consultant and mental health campaigner. She’s also married to Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West Mike Crockart.
On Sunday, she wrote a powerful piece for Scotland on Sunday talking about her experience of living with Bulimia and Depression and how she pledged to speak out to tackle the stigma attached to mental illness.
The stigma surrounding mental illness prevents us from speaking out to family, friends, let alone the wider world. I have always worried what friends might think and how it could affect my career or that of my husband, Mike Crockart, who is an MP. However, two years ago, as part of the “Time to Change Campaign” I pledged to become more open about my battles to help lift the lid, even a little, on these illnesses. I also starting reading and posting links to the mental health charity SANE and its Black Dog Campaign.
She describes the lack of NHS mental health provision and how it affected her.
As a teenager I was never referred for any specialist help, despite my lowest weight hovering at 82 pounds. My family GP recorded “anxiety”, “acute fatigue”, and prescribed Metatone and Moriamin, both supplements used in the treatment of “malnutrition, protein & vitamin deficiencies, anaemia and convalescence”. When I moved to Scotland aged 18 to study I weighed 84 pounds (I’m 5’6”).
In my twenties I waited over six months to receive cognitive and behavioural therapy. In my thirties I received various treatments including waiting another year to attend Edinburgh’s Cullen Clinic, which specialises in eating disorders. I have also paid for treatment.
I have learned to manage my depression and bulimia just as I manage my asthma. I have a toolkit of techniques to keep life on track. It can be exhausting and there are days when getting up and doing the school run feels like a mammoth task, let alone working and making decisions around food for me and my family. I still battle with my illness every day, over 30 years after I first started obsessing about food, weight and body image. I can’t avoid food, it’s a part of life and I can’t avoid life.
She wants to see mental illness treated equally:
I want to see mental illness treated equally, not as a shameful thing to be kept hidden. No-one expects me to hide my asthma or asks why I have it. No one should tolerate waiting six or 12 months or more for treatment of a physical condition. But we accept this as the norm for mental illness. It really is “Time for Change”.
You can read Sarah’s whole article here. It’s only by being open about mental illness that the stigma around it will disappear. Sarah has done all of us who heave experienced these things very proud.
Those who live in England are lucky to have a Health Minister and Deputy Prime Minister who gets what needs to be done to improve mental health provision. The most important thing any Liberal Democrat talked about last week was the Closing the Gap document which outlined 25 priorities for improving mental health services, including waiting time targets and extending the time youth and adolescent services and support are available. Norman Lamb wrote about it for us here.
Sadly, in Scotland, our health minister doesn’t get it, which already puts as behind. When vulnerable teenagers are already waiting a year to even see a specialist, and there’s a critical lack of consultant psychiatrists and psychologists, the outlook is much bleaker.
The Observer editorial on Sunday praised Nick’s work on mental health but warned that serious money needed to go behind it.
Clegg and the coalition are well intentioned. The new mental health strategy is visionary. However, without adequate resources to reverse the decline and build better foundations, and incentives for clinical commissioning groups so they do provide the services required, the economic cost of mental ill health will soar, while the human cost is already beyond measure.
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings
4 Comments
I declare an interest and very personal one: I suffer from chronic clinical depression. It is quite resistant to treatment too. That is not the main crux of what I want to say however. One of the major issues facing anyone who encounters mental health issues in their personal life is what I call the ‘Great Mental Health Ping-Pong’.
It runs like this:-
1) Your life is slowly falling apart, due to whatever influences trigger your particular mental health issue. You begin a decline in social interaction, this maybe followed by self medicating with prescription pills, over the counter pills, ‘illegal’ narcotics and or alcohol, (thankfully, I never succumbed to either of those, but it does happen). what is more likely is a deterioration in the way a person looks after themselves and if they have employment their work is bound to suffer as well.
2) If you can bring yourself to admit that there is something wrong, you might force yourself to do something about it, if like me, you will leave it to the last minute and not bother until after you have taken an extreme measure to ‘fix it’. I don’t think it is usual, not from my own experience and certainly not through the contacts I have made over the years for someone to seek assistance from their GP in its early stages. This is where prominence and acceptance is important for individuals to feel they can admit to having a mental health problem.
3) Once you have seen your GP, I have also found through experience it is pot-luck as to whether you get the correct help you need. After my first suicide attempt, I was just put on anti-depressants and told to come back in 6 weeks, no signposting to other agencies, no referral and except from medication: no medical help whatsoever. Even, if there were signposts to other agencies, I would suggest that a person already in the depths of a blackness of utter despair is not best placed to even help themselves to contact these well meaning and often very good organisations.
4) If after what I have found to be numerous attempts for referral to psychiatric services, the time it takes for an appointment can run into weeks. That is for an initial assessment with the nurse. My first ever assessment in this situation I remember vividly, I told them how I swallowed half a bottle of vintage Domestos one week (totally failed; vomited straight out) followed by a bottle of the finest bourbon and paracetamol the next week (again vomited straight out – I discovered I have a hiatus hernia – hence a nasty gagging reflex); I see the humour in that now. With each account, which is so emotionally draining and scarring it makes you feel more empty that ever, I was told it was all situational, and once those things cleared up I would be better. That was it, nothing else, Ta Ta – Keep taking the pills!
5) I was lucky, I had at the time a very persistent and thorough Locum GP, she was determined to make sure I was seen and assessed correctly. This doesn’t always happen, as a close friend of mine is finding out now. All the above points are repeated – and this is in Leeds. Even, after my depression was taken seriously and not purely on situational grounds, it was still left to me, as an individual to make the contacts to various agencies that could ease me back into society. That should not be the case, a person at their lowest ebb, is not best placed to do this. A co-ordinator should be given in every instance and a plan of action should be made very early in intervention.
As an end to this, I have been on CBT, Meds, Group Therapy and other forms of treatment, underlying health issues such as Tinnitus do little to help, but all the above have not re-wired my brain. Last September, I tried again – I had just had enough, again it was Bourbon and paracetamol. Again the 20 pills choked their way back up the throat to make a nasty white mess in my hands. I guess having a hiatus hernia has saved my life. It took six weeks for me to admit it to my GP, and then 4 weeks for an appointment back into psychiatric assessment, I was given an appointment with a psychiatrist for the beginning of February, which has now been postponed to mid-February. It would be too late, if my depression was at the same malevolent level as it were in September. My friend in Leeds, is facing a very similar issue.
What this long and rambling statement is trying to articulate is that things need to be done sooner and with more assistance given to those with mental health issues to get the help they need.
I thought that my own local mental health provider was just a poor provider. I have never tried to commit suicide (when I do I want it to succeed and so am still looking for the most assured method) but have come close, but I am shocked that someone who has tried twice to commit suicide is deemed by their initial assessment not to need the support of their local mental health team.
Reg Yeates is correct that when someone is depressed they can’t access other agencies. Reg is also correct that someone with depression needs a “co-ordinator” with an agreed plan. Then the “co-ordinator” can contact other agencies if needed and ensure support is available for the depressed person to actually get to the help available.
I know someone who committed suicide and I don’t think they would have done it if they knew the effects it would have on their family and friends. People don’t often realise how loved they are. Try to get more help:
http://www.mind.org.uk/
http://www.papyrus-uk.org/
Regarding the article: mental illness is often worse than many physical ones, so being treated as equally important should be achievable. We just need to differentiate between the people who are merely down and those suffering from mental illness, which I think is the conservative fear holding back the campaign.
—–The stigma surrounding mental illness
You victimize with your words:
The victimizer calls it “stigma”, the victim experiences it as prejudice and discrimination.