Before I say completely what this little rant is about, I want you to think about this little story.
You haven’t been well at all for the last 2 weeks or so. You thought it might be something very minor but something minor would clear up in a few days, right? You’re worried so you decide to go to your doctor and discuss it with them. They agree that it might be something to worry about, so they give you tests to see what’s wrong. After a few days, you get a call back from the doctor. They want you to come back in for a discussion about your results. This can’t be good. So, you go in and talk to the doctor and its serious, for example, cancer. Now imagine this. The doctor turns around and says its not serious enough for treatment and to come back when you are feeling worse. You’d be pretty pissed off, right? You won’t get the treatment because your case isn’t serious enough.
The disturbing fact though is that this is already happening. Of course not with cancer or a physical illness. It’s happening with mental health illnesses. You go to the doctor, he refers you to a specialist but because the system is so overrun with patients, the minor cases of depression are just getting ignored! It’s a shocking system which I’ve been through a lot. Any student who has even glanced at a psychology textbook will tell you that the most effective treatment of a mental health illness isn’t just drugs, its with psychological therapy and drugs combined. But most of these patients are just on drugs for years at a time! Their underlining issues aren’t being dealt with so as soon as they come of the drugs, they get more depressed, new symptoms occur, the patient feels worse and they struggle to return to the medication. There’s NO supervision for these patients with these drugs, which be can be very dangerous if the patient just stops them completely – and that’s more common than you think. The system in the UK is shocking towards mental health.
So, why doesn’t the hospitals or the government train more clinical psychologists to ease the system and get more minor cases seen to as will as proper supervision of drugs as well? To be a psychologist, you need a psychology degree. To get into clinical psychology, you need a postgraduate degree. After that, you go to a hospital for a 2 year placement before fully becoming a clinical psychologist. And of course, its ideal to be accreditted with the British Psychological Society too! Trust me, I’m at the degree stage of all that! But the problem, especially in Scotland, is that these 2 year placements are very very limited. Most of them are based in England which is fine if you are English. But what if you want to stay in Scotland? I’ve been looking over the last 6 or so months and I’ve only ever seen one placement in Edinburgh.
In a population of 5 million people, 1 million of them will get a mental health illness in their lifes (that’s 1 in 5) and to serve those people, we get one placement to train our future clinical psychologists? That’s just nuts!
Our British and Scottish governments need to review mental health treatments and training within the NHS. Mental health issues are a very serious matter. What’s the point of encouraging people to go, only to get turned away when they need the system the most?
Think about it.
