Borderline Personality Disorders Treated With Elastic Band NHS Therapy In The UK

This is not a spoof story. In fact its a disgusting story of impoverished Mental Health NHS UK approaches which apparently are not even accountable because these things in the UK do not rise inside the public's attention.

Patient's own reluctance to open up about these things serves to keep the ridiculous amateurish way they are treated out of view. And of course the NHS's de-risking use of "patient confidentiality" serves also to keep the Mental Health NHS services out of view too. In the NHS they do love to be shadows or to control their own PR.

The subject here is Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) . A class of the human condition that can brought on in adults by layered experiences of excessively poor early childhood attachments, child abuse and a lack of emotional validation. In later life it can manifest as self harming behaviours, low self esteem, suicidality. It can be accompanied with terrible anxiety at being in the world somehow alone , a lack of feeling of safety, and even panic .

For some people, the degree of this developmental imprint in them is profound . In the UK NHS which is almost broadly anti-feeling-therapy like the UK character itself - it seems to be unable to deal with constructing the more extended emotional skills of emotionally rescuing tracts of people's justifiable rages (about their developments) and very great pain. Broadly it appears to be not helping to resolve deep grief life-experiences. Connected therapeutic crying over time for early repeated trauma it seems is off limits ...

Yet cases are being reported to UserWatch where Community Psychiatric staff have recommended elastic bands to be put on the wrist by BPD sufferers and used to "distract" them away from panic or thoughts of self harm .

I suppose you might call this "Sting-ping" therapy. Don't worry if you do, satire has become a sign of sanity . And at UserWatch we'll give you an astral certificate with our hearts .

The sheer power of disturbing feelings ascending in BPD is rather like an emotional express train and in many sufferers when they have those ascending feelings of pain they need to cut themselves with the anguish . Their's is a case of tears of blood.

Also, an elastic band stinging away on the skin put by the side of real panic is like jumping into an eggshell when there is an American Katrina around the corner .

UserWatch and PatientGuard which is morally hissed off about unreported UK NHS Philobullshitology has made an offer to parts the patient community of which itself is a part, to get more stories out into the exposure of debate with some added feeling ..

So far we have come up with cases of Sting-ping therapy for panic, and used for the distraction of self harming thoughts.

But we are human explorers, and what is also developing are real stories of ICE CUBE DISTRACTION THERAPY . This is where self harming thoughts are treated by cold distraction . In other good old Pavlovian words, "punish" the association with self harming thoughts with ice cubes ..!

Staff of course are obviously being taught this impoverished anti-feeling anti historic trauma - rubbish .

Patient's who are highly dependent will follow anything to relieve distress and discomfort, and that is their disadvantage but no-one can blame them - they are truly wrecked by their internal world of Self and have little compass left and now are dependent on the polar NHS .

In the UK, without quality therapies being broadly available, patient's one way or another are being kept "on ice" - whether that is chemical evasion of human issues in the human condition, or now it seems actual ICE ....

Set this against a lack of empathy software in the new UK Computerised Cognitive Behaviour Therapy roll out (as from March 2007) and we are set with many superficialities as "treatment"

Why can't staff admit they are poorly trained and feel helpless - after all their "hour-age" could be converted financially to a patient steered choice of deeper therapeutic choices ?

Of course this would happen if given the chance . Then patients would be increasingly rejecting the NHS or shaping it to respond properly . There's the rub - the State in the UK refuses to allow the patient reality to escape in quality driving their own experience by challenging the farcical supply side . This way the State keeps patient's more unwell and it keeps the NHS and a lot of jobs ticking . It does not make sense, but in the UK the welfare state has become a form of patient choiceless entrapment.

At UserWatch we think there's a good consumer story here which the BBC and its program "WatchDog" could check out. The minimal psychology in this elastic band distraction therapy is about valid as a snake oil cure based on the placebo effect ..A bit of relief for a time does not a therapy make ......

(Later Note : We discovered the BBC had in fact run a piece on this tosh which was all about the wish fulfillment of services trying to create distraction rather than employing probing deep therapy, based on eliciting destructive feelings . The NHS services broadly use simplistic cover-up tactics on seriously post traumatized often child abused people who have not had their history and feelings properly validated or even worked with - welcome to UK Services-Madland)