Closing off our options

People with mental health problems are facing a difficult and uncertain future. Services are closing, many have already gone, and, as a result, people with serious psychiatric conditions may soon have nowhere to go for help and support writes mental health service user Maureen Oliver

Already, service users sit alone and isolated, in their flats and bedsits all day or aimlessly wander the streets.

In my own case, the loss of the local resource centre with its therapeutic and social benefits has resulted in increased isolation. I have lost touch with most of my fellow service users and, far from this having led to my spending more time out and about in the local community, it has made it more difficult for me to find the confidence to socialise with others.

A significant number of people with mental health problems have little or no contact with family and former friends. Some of this is due to stigma and prejudice but it is also an outcome of the intense feelings of isolation that often accompany mental and emotional distress.

Due to cuts in hostel provision locally, individuals are being moved out to facilities in other areas, often a considerable distance away. In at least one case, a man known to me was uprooted from his home and sent to a hostel on the south coast, many miles away. He knew no one there and the environment was totally unfamiliar to him. As a consequence, he became seriously unwell and is now being treated as an in-patient.

Many of the intentions behind the closures and cutbacks seem, on the face of it, to be honourable ones. People should be out in the community, working preferably, or otherwise usefully engaged. All well and good, but what about those individuals with severe mental illness or in acute crisis who are simply not capable of meaningful work or community based pastimes?

I’m speaking here as someone who has experienced such things - I had my life torn apart by mental illness. If it were not for the intervention of mental health services and available treatment and support, I would have died long ago. I say this as someone who has often railed at doctors and the psychiatric “system”. Personally,

I do not find it easy to be “compliant” and have had quite a struggle – possibly an ongoing one – in coming to terms with the need to take medication etc. Encouraging people who have a serious psychiatric condition to take medication, always a difficult matter, will become impossible without the services needed in order to offer support and guidance.