In the limelight- Referrals

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How do you get to become a member of the glorious club that is CAMHS? Well first you have to be fucked up, fucked up to pass the tests, to manage the initiation ceremony to get there. Well the whole process is in our stages in my area and feels a little bit like a test to see how committed you are to recovery, that is if you are ill of course. Stage number one is to book a non urgent appointment with a GP, go through the humiliation of explaining everything to them in the hope of a referral and crossing your fingers, this is the easiest stage. Then you receive a letter inviting you to make an appointment, this would be easy if there was an answerphone or the phone is not permanently engaged. Then you will meet with a member of the team for a “choice” appointment here again you have to explain everything again but in more detail and for longer in the hope that they think you are screwed up enough to be a member of the select club, the service user. And stage four is where all the fun begins; you are a fully fledged member of the CAMHS club, part of the choice and partnership gang.

Sound fun? I wish it was. This process takes ages and ages, shropshire CAMHS reported that in July 2005 only 26% were seen in the target of 13 weeks, just over three months and they did not provide figures for how long everyone else had to wait. Everyone wants any health related referral to be quick in case your condition worsens. I wish when I was referred to CAMHS they had a policy like that of five boroughs partnership trust, where ever that is, unfortunately when I was referred there was no policy, one was introduced last year and now there is only a two week waiting list. So my travel through the referral process was far from smooth, in fact it was crazily disjointed and poorly managed.

I started the referral process in February of 2006, I hadn’t heard of CAMHS before but my school told me to go to my GP and ask for a referral. So after some pushing by my friends and a two week wait for a non urgent with a GP I was referred. Well actually my GP said he would sort something out, I assumed a referral and I hoped that it would be to CAMHS but I didn’t actually know. I suppose it was all quite easy, a quick chat with my doctor and off went a letter to the CAMHS team. Two weeks later I received a letter inviting me to make a “choice” appointment at a health center in a town I had never heard of. Everything seemed to be moving quite quickly, I was a standard referral and not at all urgent and within two weeks of my GP appointment I was being offered an appointment. This to me was evidence that the NHS was working well, but then I started to hit problems. When I phoned to book an appointment there were none, well not for a month and a half. I booked an appointment for mid April and waited. On the day of my assessment the member of staff I was meant to see was ill, I was told this twenty minutes before my appointment. I phoned again to book another appointment but there was another months wait, it was going to be early june when I saw someone. During the four months of trying to arange my referral I had given up hope of ever getting help and given up helping myself. Eventually I met a social worker who took my history and offered me 8-10 sessions of CBT. It all seemed good, until I was told there was a waiting list for CBT. For me it was just too little too late, the next time I saw someone from the CAMHS team was in A&E after my first, and rather pathetic, attempt at an overdose. They decided that I would have weekly sessions with a social worker until four months ago when I attempted to discharge myself, took a massive overdose and ended up in the local mental health unit.

Last line…

If you do a google image search on depression you will find tonnes of pictures of young girls looking sad with their hands in their dark glossy hair, far better than the man the BBC loves so much. But there is a problem with all these pictures, why are they all women, are men not allowed to have depression? Why is their hair so glossy, why do they look a picture of health? Why are they all averageweight, what about all the extra medication weight, or being to thin due to lack of appetite from depression?- maybe this is why depression is glamorised, because people think about being pout-y and occasionally crying.

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Tags: appointment, CAMHS, choice, depression, GP, hospital, overdose, referral, suicide, targets