What is left for people with moderate to severe mental illness in England

We are aware Mental Health services in England had already been in distress before the pandemic had happened but what about now and what is left for people with mental illness?

After speaking to doctors and people within the Mental Health system all that is left is Talking Therapies, Living Well and being sectioned in a Mental Health unit.

• Talking Therapies

Talking Therapies is good for having someone who will listen to you and work out a way to change things for the better, the problem is with the long wait, the length could be over a year before you get to see someone due to the amount of people having mental health difficulties.

We have read that a service user complained about the length of time and also once she managed to see someone the person from the service was not a qualified psychologist and this concerned the individual.

Talking Therapies from what information we have is not good enough for those wanting psychological help and are in a bad situation where they need help and not time limited help.

• Living Well

This service is again time limited but it is believed you get to see someone with experience such as a social worker or a psychologist and you need to be referred by your GP.

Living Well is basically Blu Sci run and offers help with some of the issues you have depending on the situation it might be you get to see someone for a longer period of time, it also gets you back doing things again in the community, joining a group, getting a bus pass, and help with medications which will be overseen by a NHS mental health worker.

If you have severe mental illness where you are a threat to yourself or others you ‘might’ get to see someone in the Community Mental Health Team who will after an assessment could send you to a Mental Health Hospital who will further assess you and could section you and hold you and it might be very far away.

This is all people have that we are aware about on the NHS which is simply not good enough, here in Trafford we used to have a proper advocacy service with which the then Trafford Tory group would not fund this vital service thinking Trafford CAB could do better when they themselves were having funding problems, had this service been running now things would have been much different.

People who are unwell and getting next to no support or being fobbed off by Mental Health Services would have had a much better chance of the right outcome.

Trafford Labour have also been as bad as the Tories, they dropped some funding for a smaller scale advocacy service called ‘Advocacy Focus’ which helped initially to get services to sort out any problems, now they are from what we know are utterly useless.

We did contact the leader Tom Ross about getting the funding back to normal and he through a spokesperson told us they would be back in touch but even after three attempts for an update they didn’t respond.

The problems with Mental Health Services we believe up and down the land is due to several factors one of them being funding and too many people wanting help, some of the staff after the pandemic did not come back which did not help things.

The current Tory Government keeps talking big about how much the NHS gets but in reality its peanuts, with the amount of teenagers addicted to cannabis and other drugs its only a matter of time before some of them also end up mentally unwell.

A Mental Health ticking time bomb that is just about to go bang leaving tens of thousands of genuinely unwell people up and down the land with nothing and that cannot be accepted.

Labour is set to take over from the Tories in the General Election, a new government, new ideas and maybe new hope, however do not get too carried away! the mess this government has left the new Labour government will take many years to fix, with the debt left behind where is Starmer going to get the money from? thin air?

The worry is Labour will go after people on benefits much worse than the Tories which is already bad enough! politicians have no idea about mental health, no idea what depression is and leaving people with nothing means more misery, more people getting into crime and sadly more people committing suicide!