Trying to get the NHS Mental Health Services emergency funding

isautistic

Hi there  
I’m part of a group called Call Your MP. We’re trying to get the NHS Mental Health Services, both adult and child, emergency funding. We’re asking as many people as we can to call their member of Parliament on the twentieth of May and tell them why you believe the NHS Mental Health Services need emergency funding. It’s totally free to take part, you don’t need to be over 18 and you don’t need to sign up, you can just take part. You can find out who your member of Parliament is and the way you can contact them (It doesn’t need to be through call. It could be through email, ect. Although every MP has different contact info so your MP might only have a phone number) at https://members.parliament.uk/members/Commons . Feel free to ask me any questions you might have

isautistic

woodbine said:

We are lead to believe that more and more money is being poured into mental health services in the UK, I suspect the other side of the coin is that during the last year or so more and more people have needed help and will continue to need help, but if i'm honest I'm not a great believer in chucking money at anything. sometimes I think we need to spend the money that's already there in better more effective ways.

Forgive me, for this is my first time using this website and I  Don’t know if this is the correct way to respond to people. Let me explain a little bit about why we’re doing this. I got the idea to start this initiative when the NHS phycologist doing my evaluation for getting help from the adult mental health services told me that the current system is the way it is due to lack of funding, while explaining to me why they operate the way they do, after I told her the system they operate with seems as though it is very unhelpful and how I’m not sure I can actually get help from it. And although that is a recent interaction I have had, underfunding is not a recent issue. In twenty-seventeen I lost an NHS child Mental Health councillor because the office she worked in in my aria way shut due to lack of funding (her own words) and the new office was to far away from where she lived. Not to mention that the new office was shared with non-Mental-Health-related services. And wether or not funding for NHS mental health services has increased year on year, the point is that it is clearly not enough. Through out raising awareness about this I’ve also seen other mental health professionals and had one mental health professional tell me personally that what the NHS Mental Health Services really need is funding. 

Tori_Scope

Welcome to the community @isautistic Thanks for sharing your idea to get people to contact their MPs, and for explaining a little bit more about where the idea has come from.

You responded to woodbine correctly. You don't have to quote another users' comment in your own if you don't want to, as you can tag a user by writing @ and then their username.

I'm sorry that you've had a couple of bad experiences with NHS mental health services. Are you currently on-track for getting support from adult mental health services?

[Deleted User]

Personally, I think one of the biggest waste of nhs funding is paying so many managers , when we actually need more doctors, nurses, mental health councillors etc etc. 
Years ago we didn't have so many managers and now we have far too many!

isautistic

@Tori_Scope thank you for telling me how to respond to people. Unfortunately I don’t know if I’m on track to get help from adult mental health services. Like I said, I’m currently getting evaluated and am not sure of the type of help they will determine I need. Although, unfortunately even if I am on track to get given help, I’m not sure that the current system can help me. You choose one issue you experience to work on and are given a set number of appointments to get help with it. At the end of these appointments, wether you’re better or not, you’re removed from the service and need to rejoin the year long waiting list if you want more help or help with something else. I experience a lot of different issues which are very complex. At best it’s going to take me ten-ish years to get all the help I need and at worst I’ll enter a cycle of not getting enough help through out my set appointments to fix the problem and all the progress I made in those appointments being undone by the time I can get more appointments, this cycle only being broken by me no longer seeking mental health help, which should never be the case for anyone. 

isautistic

givingup said:

Personally, I think one of the biggest waste of nhs funding is paying so many managers , when we actually need more doctors, nurses, mental health councillors etc etc. 
Years ago we didn't have so many managers and now we have far too many!

I would say that in terms of mental health services the system is so bad that it needs a million managers. Something that baffles me is that the NHS Adult Mental Health Service is not an integrated Service. There’s psychology, occupational therapy, nurses and social work and they’re all separate services. Meaning that if you start with a psychologist and they decide you also need help from OT, they can’t just request that a member of the Adult Mental Health Service who is an OT be put on your case. They have to send a separate referral to the Adult Occupational Therapy Service. If it was an integrated service there wouldn’t be the need for so many managers 

[Deleted User]

Maybe I should of put, a sensible management team!

isautistic

@givingup fair! the whole system needs reworked. But my understanding is that in order to do that, they need more funding