Mama had a baby and his head popped off

To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.
- Buddha

It’s as easy as that. At least I know where I’ve been going wrong now. Controlling the mind. There should be people to help with this, and there are. They’re the mental health professionals who work with people like me – those unable to control their own minds. Or in their own parlance, service users.

From The Socialist newspaper, 18 August 2010

Cuts devastate mental health services
Community mental health care bosses in Southwark, south London, aim to save £3.7 million in two years. They have explicitly stated that they are moving away from providing sustained, long term community support by handing responsibility to patients, who may not be ready or able to manage their own care.

Community teams across Southwark currently support 2,800 patients but are now expected to rapidly discharge 500 to 800 clients. All agency posts are to be cut, which will result in workloads increasing.

Smaller teams of six workers are planned, made up of three ‘band six’ and three ‘band five’ workers. However, most of the existing nursing posts are in band six, whose experience and training are of paramount importance when supporting people with severe and enduring illness within their communities. This means almost half of the workers will be demoted and suffer pay cuts of between £5,000 and £10,000 a year, depending on length of service.

The demotions will lead to demoralisation amongst frontline, very experienced staff who are effectively being driven out, reducing the amount of experience, skill and training in the workforce.

Patient admission stays are also to be cut, meaning patients will be briefly, and possibly more frequently, locked up, drugged up and then discharged with very short term, patchy support. GPs will be expected to care for chronically disabled people and they will not have the skills, time or desire to fill the gaps in mental health service provision.

If patients are not adequately supported then both patients and communities will be left exposed to increased rates of violent incidents, self harm, suicide, severe neglect, substance abuse and homelessness.

A mental health worker

I don’t know who wrote the above piece, but I sent it to a mental health professional in Southwark, and they confirmed every word of it. They even expressed surprise at the veracity of the account. I’m sure some will read the source and immediately dismiss it because it doesn’t come from an organ with a trusted mainstream masthead.

So the number of mental health workers will dwindle. This current government will continue its efforts to force the good ship Britain to sail under the maxim uttered in Withnail and I. “Free to those that can afford it. Very expensive to those that can’t.” That’s the real message of the Big Society right there.

It won’t just be in London, of course. Rufus May is a clinical psychologist, working in West Yorkshire. Writing just over a week ago in the Independent, May reminds us that he is “working at the wrong end of things”.

People like me are being asked to work with those people who have already burnt out, which I love, but is this the best use of resources? We should be working in schools, churches, community organisations and workplaces, to help stop people ever reaching breaking point.

I’m not suggesting we all run back to old buildings run by sexually repressed men in white, and have a one-sided conversation with a man who is also his own son, and a ghost, who lives in the clouds. If I did that, ‘They’ would really come after me with the butterfly nets right? Ho ho. But it’s impossible to disagree with May when he says that we’ve forgotten how to take care of each other, a role the church and the other organisations used to fill (for better and worse):

We need a complete re-think: more money learning how to relate to each other, care for one another, and tolerate each other, rather than more psychiatrists, more nurses, more psychologists and more drugs. We need to work alongside distressed people and help them become more resilient, not treat them like lepers. Such stigma about mental health is shattering people, yet there is no such thing as ill or not ill, no “them” and “us”; mental health is a continuum we all move along. At the moment, we are spending billions of pounds on boats to rescue those who are drowning, when we should be teaching everyone, from a very young age, how to swim and how to help those who are floundering.

Sadly, this is the opposite of what we are doing. I can’t talk about my departure from my previous employers, but can state one fact that was evident at the time of leaving (it may well be different now, but I doubt it). My healthcare cover explicitly covered physical illnesses only. I didn’t break my neck. The fractures happened a good six inches further up, and not to a bone, but to an internal organ. With no mental health procedure in place, instead of throwing me a lifeline, they just scratched their collective heads and wondered why I couldn’t swim.

They lost money, productivity and someone who had been a good worker. I lost a job, my self-respect, and my frayed sanity unravelled further. Now I’m told I’m no better than the people who live in my neighbourhood who’ve been on benefits all their life. And politics, left or right, is no longer a divider, as the readers and commenters on the self-styled “World’s leading liberal voice,” fall over each other to align themselves with America’s Tea Party. We disabled aren’t shirkers, wrote Alice Maynard in the Guardian. Yes you jolly well are, replied the masses.

We have forgotten how to take care of each other. On levels fundamental and emotional, practical and even commercial – the last of which being the only language this government appears to speak. David Cameron can pour his septic spin in your ears about a Big Society, but the (wo)man behind the curtain still believes that there is no such thing as society. Fuck you if you can’t afford it, you’re on your own. Where does that leave people who can’t control their own minds?

We have forgotten how to take care of each other, but some of us never gave a rat’s ass in the first place. It’s not the government’s job to solve all of every individual’s problems, as Margaret Thatcher says (let’s for the time being leave alone this huge misinterpretation of society); but that won’t change the fact that some people can’t control themselves, and can’t afford help. It is the government’s purpose, it is the government’s duty, to look after those who need help. Not just those who can afford it.

The professionals who can aid these people don’t work in schools, churches, community organisations or workplaces. They work in state-funded mental health organisations. It’s not perfect, or maybe even ideal, but it’s the last port of call. Now they will be forced to turn people away. Incidences of “[violence,] self harm, suicide, severe neglect, substance abuse and homelessness” will increase (just as they did in the 1980s). Let’s see how the Big Society holds up then.