
What does Wales have to say of a one merged mental health-trust ?
Having a single organisation approach will create more problems than it solves, says Jonathan Morgan, as he calls for a rethink on service delivery
HEALTH Minister Edwina Hart announced the outcome of the review into mental health services led by Professor Michael Williams in June.
His thorough review of the way that we plan and provide for mental health services followed a raft of concerns from politicians, clinicians, service users and bodies who felt that we had not paid enough attention to mental health services.
I welcomed this review at the time and the “blue skies thinking” that emerged as a major contribution to an issue that concerns me personally.
One of the reasons why I have been pursuing the devolution of powers to Wales to allow us to legislate in the field of mental health is because of its Cinderella status.
The Joint Parliamentary Committee into the UK Mental Health Bill in 2004 concluded that services in Wales were less developed than elsewhere in the UK.
I suppose this was their polite way of saying that things in Wales were pretty dreadful in comparison.
Bizarrely, there are two very good strategies that should improve the services for people with mental illness. Firstly the Adult Mental Health National Service Framework outlines a range of access to services that would improve the assessment of patients’ needs, treatment and care, emergency cover and advocacy.
On paper the plan looks robust, in practice it is flimsy."
But does mental health have a Cinderally status ? What does that mean really ? That it is kept impoverished ?
At UserWatch we really wonder about this because we think the trail of money that is used, is not reaching the patient in care needs. Needless rotating crisis based on poor support is still occurring whilst at the same time extra health bureaucracy has been formed and has been parroting policy for years . The newer layers of ex-service users and other "staff innovators" recruited for user-bureaucracy like NIMHE. appear to be merging into the Strategic Health Authority in the West Mids . They have served their purpose of endorsing the will of a Govt afraid to truly go to the people and endorse what they needed in Patient Choice . Instead NIMHE were turned to the will of the D0H-DWP axis to put "work first" ..
There can be no independence though that is not first underpinned by supporting dependency in a way that actually sees its individual issues and responds to them accurately ...For too many a circle of being deprived of good human help is the reality . The State have made it so .
We are years away from being even close to addressing social and emotional reasons for many MH damaged people's personality problems and altering states of mind .
Constantly drugging people though, is still refrigeration of social problems internalised in them and echoed into endless invalidity by a system that wishes to keep people away from supported reflection and the aided emotional journeys of being able to tolerate more of what they are ..
The job of reflection is hard and emotionally painful. The Self wins itself back only slowly from pain in decent therapies . Reflection when deeply helped is however giving up drugged parrothood and slowly other repeating states of what is at base emotional helpessness that genuinely needs new languages of personal navigation . Personal navigation is uniquely unparrotlike ..But the State you will understand prefers parrots .....
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