Tag: Service-users

Therapy

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I know many people have enormous difficulty accessing therapy for depression- but as someone who has benefited for it, provided it, and supervised others, I realize how fortunate I’ve been, and how important it has been personally for me. Antidepressants have helped me with many of the symptoms of depression, but I still needed to sort out the conflicts and problems in my life that had contributed to the emotional mess in which I found myself. We keep hearing how there will be medication tailored to suit each individual some day, but I don’t think there will ever be a tablet labeled ‘take two a day to come to terms with how you feel about your mother.’

Over a period of about 12 years, during my twenties and thirties I underwent psychodynamic therapy, something in which I had also had some training – with 3 different therapists. Two of them helped me but there was one with whom I simply could not ‘gel’. Finding a therapist with whom you can make some kind of emotional connection is essential. I was able to learn how the problems in my childhood and the dysfunctional relationships I had with both of my parents were still affecting my adult life. I’m quite sure that, at the time, that was the best type of therapy for me. There were some major unresolved issues from my childhood and adolescence that  interfered with my ability to make stable, trusting relationships. I had also spectacularly failed to grieve for my father, who died when I had just qualified as a doctor. There was a period of a few years in my late twenties when my emotional life can only be described as chaotic. With therapy I was able to access the parts of my personality that I had been desperately trying to keep under control, but sometimes the new and more assertive me who emerged from the chrysalis of therapy was more of  an abrupt and outspoken moth still seeking the light of day, than a perfectly finished social butterfly. Nevertheless talking therapy helped me to address some of the difficulties that I had in the major relationships in my life and embark on what has been a successful second marriage.

Later, when undertaking a course of cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), I found ways to begin to manage the way I ruminate about being me in this world and to cope more effectively with people in day-to-day life. Therapy was anchored in the present, not the past and I began to learn much more about how my mind actually worked. I could identify my previously unspoken, but very difficult to live up to,‘Rules for Living’ from David Burn’s book the ‘Feeling Good Handbook’, and I began to understand how attempting to live up to my internal very high but often conflicting standards, led to experiencing anxiety in everyday life. It is six years now since I completed that last course of therapy and I am beginning to realize just how long it can take for it to work. I still continue to have new insights into why I am the way I am, and what triggers and sustains those periods of anxiety and low mood, as life goes by. Life is a ‘work in progress’, or at least that is how it has seemed for me.

What most people get offered now in the first instance now is brief therapy, mostly based on CBT principles. For many people that will be very helpful- and when I was supervising a primary care based team of therapists, I saw how effective it could be- particularly if the behavioural aspect of CBT – behavioural activation- was employed first. CBT is very much about ‘doing’ things to feel better. Like setting goals for activities that you may have stopped doing. Or actively trying to address the depressive automatic thoughts that can both trigger and maintain depressed mood- both with the aim of getting you out of the shadow of depression to which you retreated when you lost the energy to fight anymore. In some ways the conceptual basis of brief CBT based therapy isn’t all that different from medication- in that both seek to ‘activate’ either your mind or your body. You get going and take up your life again. You are ‘fixed’ at least for the present as your deficit, of either serotonin or self-esteem ,has been addressed, as Alain Ehrenberg in his book on the sociology of depression, ‘The Weariness of the Self’, clearly describes. And in today’s climate you must of course take responsibility for helping yourself to get fixed- through self-help or presenting yourself at the doctor’s office.

CBT helped me when I was struggling with  my depressive ruminations and it was the right therapy at the right time. But when I was younger, and I couldn’t make sense of who I was or wanted to be, I needed time to build up trust in a therapist, and work on the complex problems from my past that actually interfered with me engaging in therapy in the first place. As I wrote recently, the simple ‘fix’ doesn’t work for a significant number of people who are depressed- particularly those dealing with painful conflicts and the impact of trauma- and we realistically should not expect it to. They need what I was fortunate enough to receive, but it is less available than ever- not only because of cuts, but the prevailing view that depression in primary care is something that can be ‘fixed’. Some people need time to engage, to trust and to work out how to discover who they are and learn how to forgive themselves for even being alive. Some who don’t respond to the simple fix are labeled as having borderline personality disorder- and their anguish is downgraded to ‘distress’ but they too are experiencing something that is only one aspect of the many faceted but hard to define experience that we call ‘depression’. I can assure you that it is real and those who suffer from it kill themselves.

Those who need more than the quick fix are  just as deserving of our attention- and our help.

 

Going North- the problems of trying to lead a disciplined life.

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It is high Summer in Orkney, and I am back again in Scotland once more.

When things are difficult in my life I’ve always headed North. I don’t mean the North of England. That’s pretty much where I come from now. I’ve lived and worked there long enough to be a real ‘Northerner’. When I go South to London I like to broaden my accent a bit for the hell of it. But for most of my life the real North has only existed somewhere in my imagination- a magical place that never seems entirely real until I arrive there- and when I do it isn’t because I’ve reached some point on the map. Its more than that, it’s the sense of peace that infuses first my limbs and then seeps through my body. My heart rate slows down. I can feel the blood pressure in my arteries falling as the valves that constantly drip adrenaline into my system and contribute to my persistent feeling of anxiety are closed down one by one. Not by medication, but by nature. I can stop moving. My skin begins to tingle and itch as the wounds beneath, the invisible ones I’ve carried around most of my life, begin to heal.

Recovery isn’t just about absence of symptoms. Researchers who deal in the currency of symptoms talk about how in depression we pass from ‘normalcy’ (whatever that is) to the experience of ‘disorder’ followed hopefully by ‘response’ to the treatment, ‘remission’ of symptoms (in which they lessen or disappear) and then ‘recovery’, but many of us have ‘residual’ symptoms which wax and wane over time. Similarly psychological therapies are not designed to achieve a ‘cure’ in medical terms. We have to find ways of living with from day to day with our symptoms, problems and unresolved psychological conflicts. Health professionals rarely ask ‘How do you get through the day?’ yet that is such an important question. Every morning when you finally get out of bed, you have to face several hours of being, doing, feeling and interacting before you can get back under the duvet. For me, how to survive this daily experience is central to the process of recovery.

But I’ve never been very disciplined and in many ways I am still a rebellious child. I dislike going to bed. Without my husband to get me up to bed I can sit lost in my thoughts, reading, surfing the net or watching the TV for hours. I can lie in bed half the morning like a teenager.

I have this intention every time I come up here that this time I am going to get myself into some kind of healthy daily regime. There is so much information about the kind of lifestyle I should lead if I am going to learn how to manage my recurrent downswings in mood and loss of energy, which are the first signs that I might be becoming more severely depressed again. I know there are some things I can do to stay well. The list is endless and I know there is some evidence for all of these things: taking regular exercise, getting sufficient sleep for my age, avoiding alcohol and other ‘substances’ and eating a “Mediterranean diet” (not always easy in Scotland- never mind if you are on a low income). I also know that, given my propensity for relapses I should stay on the medication I have taken, in one form or another for more than 20 years, as well as the other tablets I have for my physical health problems. Keeping my mind on track is essential here as I am alone most of the time. It’s a great place to practice the skill of allowing the boxes containing ‘difficult thoughts’ to pass across on the horizon of my mind without having to unpack them. I know there is a lot of rubbish in them that really needs to be thrown out. If I allow a worry to take over my mind here its quite difficult to elude it. My mood soon begins to spiral downwards. These are the skills, based on Mindfulness I began to learn in the Cognitive Therapy I underwent a few years ago, to help manage ruminative thoughts.

I must get to bed before midnight and up before 8. Eat healthy meals that I have cooked myself. Take some exercise every day. There is a voice inside me saying ‘if you do these things you will not only be well, but you will be good’. But why do I have to be good? I find it impossible to be good all the time. Can anyone truthfully manage that?

So I cannot tell you a satisfying tale of how I did all of these things that I know should help me and they did. I can only say that when I am able to do them, they do.

I am gradually learning to forgive myself for failing to always live up to the targets I set myself for each day. I made them, so I can break them. I don’t have to spend every hour doing something useful- where does that idea come from? I have a choice. It doesn’t really matter if I don’t get any cleaning done until just before I return to Yorkshire. The North is a place where I find it easier to be me because it reflects something about what is inside me- I can see myself reflected in the lochs, the moorland and hills- a little chilly at times and not to everybody’s taste, but perhaps worth discovering. We all have to find a place where we feel we can be ourselves. I need to learn how to carry the essence of it back South with me. The longer I am here, with each visit, the easier it is becoming.

My latest book’The Other Sides of Silence- A psychiatrist’s memoir of depression is out now and also just published in  USA

Ambivalence

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I wish they had taught me about ambivalence at medical school. It would have made my life immeasurably easier if I had understood it earlier. Instead I was quite a long way into my career before I really began to see how important it was both to my patients, and to me personally.

I was taught what to do for each clinical problem with the expectation that a person would be ready, and willing, to accept my advice. If he or she wasn’t, they were something of a nuisance, indecisive, unable to recognise what was good for them. ‘Oh she’s ambivalent about it,’ I would be told if a person was shilly-shallying around. Ambivalence as a concept was confused with indecision. But it isn’t. It’s something much more than that. It’s about wanting to have something at the same time as not having it. Wanting to be thin, but to eat a large slab of chocolate every day.  Wanting both the benefits of sobriety and inebriation. Even wanting to be both dead, and alive at the same time. I know from talking to people who have tried to kill themselves and failed, that they sometimes wanted to be both still here among the living, yet dead and out of their suffering too. Some of them changed their minds as soon as they had acted to end their lives and came to seek help. Ambivalence underpins so many of the problems people have brought to me, and my own difficulties too. I was an ambivalent medical student, and for many years an ambivalent doctor. I wanted both to belong to a profession and all the benefits that come with it, and not to belong because of the cost to me personally and emotionally.

If you haven’t read Kenneth Weisbrode’s recent short book on the topic, entitled ‘On Ambivalence’ I can highly recommend it.

‘Ambivalence lies at the core of who we are. It is something more subtle, and more devastating than human frailty. Weaknesses can be remedied. Ambivalence comes, rather from too much ambition. Desire begets dissatisfaction, and vice versa. Optimization becomes a fetish. Wanting the ‘best’ means that we must have both or all and are reluctant to give up any option lest we pull up the roots of our desire. That is why ambivalence is so hard to confront, understand. Or master. And why it can be so disastrous.  Most of us know this. Yet we continue to deny it.’ (p2)

 

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The person who is ambivalent about their eating, or drinking, or lifestyle ( add ad infinitum) is not only unable to choose the from the options they have in front of them, but refuses somehow to admit that there is even a choice to be made at all. It’s both a painful yet oddly pleasurable place to be. We cannot have it all, but still somehow  want to believe that we can. We don’t have to decide what to do, to change our lives, because there isn’t a decision to be made. Yet we suffer because we struggle to live what is an impossible existence, only we don’t admit how impossible it really is.

If I had understood this when I was younger, I might have been able to recognise how much suffering is rooted in ambivalence. I began to understand it when I worked in addictions, and later with people who had eating disorders.  I’ve talked to many people who have felt judged rather than helped by those they have consulted; who have been labelled as weak because they are unable to ‘choose to change their behaviour’, rather than essentially ambivalent about life and what they wanted from it. I was influenced by Bill Miller, who first described Motivational Interviewing in the 1980s. I remember reading about how the clients of the clinic where he worked were routinely asked if they were willing to accept the label of alcoholism and accept treatment. That was exactly what I witnessed as a junior doctor:

Consultant: ‘So do you think you are an alcoholic?’

Patient : ..’No… I don’t’

Consultant: ‘Are you prepared to attend AA?’

Patient: ‘Why would I want to do that.?’

Consultant: ‘Well, if you aren’t prepared to admit that, you aren’t motivated to accept help. Come back again when you are.’

We may say it doesn’t happen quite like now, but it does. A person who doesn’t see the need to make a decision about taking up therapy and attends only intermittently is rapidly discharged for being unmotivated.  Instead of trying to understand their ambivalence and empathising with the problems they are experiencing which make it impossible for them to contemplate a decisive response to their problems, we treat them as wasting our time. When he first described Motivational Interviewing, Miller emphasized the responsibility of the therapist in helping the client to acknowledge and explore their ambivalence. When the person is ‘unmotivated’ we are discharged, as therapists, from our responsibilities.

I was personally fortunate. I had a therapist who was prepared to engage me in acknowledging that I both wanted to succeed and to fail in my career, and ultimately to both to live and to die. I’m still ambivalent, but I don’t want to talk about that now. There isn’t time. My cat is currently driving me crazy, wanting to be on both sides of the back door at once. Now that’s ambivalence.

 

Reassessing ‘assessment’

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One of the side effects of having more time than I used to is that I begin to brood over the meaning of the words I once used without a second thought. It particularly happens on long walks without the running commentary of the radio. In a recent bIog I talked about ‘recovery’. Now I’ve started to think about a word I would never have given much more than a second thought too as a working psychiatrist- ‘assessment’.

The problem with many words in mental health is that they can begin to assume alternate meanings. Use of the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ tense can be important too in conveying a sense of who has the power. There is something very passive about being ‘counseled’ and the act of counseling has itself taken on various meanings from receiving counseling as ‘therapy’, wise counsel as ‘advice’ and being ‘counseled’ as a form of disciplinary act.

I don’t remember as a psychiatric trainee being specifically trained to carry out a ‘psychiatric assessment’. I was taught how to master a psychiatric interview, which considered of ‘taking the history’ (which can sound and feel rather like a rather one-sided action on the part of the doctor, removing something from the patient) and carrying out a mental state examination. I soon learned that for the interview to be effective I had to spend as long actively engaging the patient in thinking I was a person with whom they would be willing to share their experiences, as asking all the questions that psychiatrists are (in)famous for. Later on, I began to research how both GPs and psychiatrists approach the ‘consultation’ as the meeting between professional and patient is commonly known in primary care. Indeed actively ‘consulting’ the doctor conveys more power to the patient than being interviewed or assessed by them. I spent hours, days and weeks observing interactions for my research. I remember the patient who, when asked by the psychiatrist whether he knew if he had had a traumatic birth quite reasonably replied ‘well the Battle of Britain was on at the time doctor’.

Somewhere along the line, the psychiatric interview or consultation became the ‘assessment’ with a list of questions to ask the patient. Changes in the examination system of doctors reinforced this, with the shorter structured OSCEs (Observed Structured Clinical Examinations) with role-played patients, that are probably fairer to the candidates, but reward marks for asking the ‘right questions’ when ‘assessing depression’, ‘suicide risk’ or ‘hallucinations’. I’m as guilty of this as anyone. I teach suicide risk assessment skills. The blurb for my latest book on depression mentions assessment too.

So what’s the problem I have with assessment? Well, when a person assesses another they are implicitly making a judgment about their suitability for something or their ability to achieve particular goals. As a patient I have been assessed for therapy. That’s fair enough perhaps when there are indications as to whether or not a person might benefit rom that intervention. Psychologists regularly carry out assessments perfectly reasonably as not everyone will benefit from their specialist expertise. But how often is this mutual assessment? Are you a person I could talk to?

And so often now I see mental health assessment as a tool to exclude rather than seek to help a person find the help they might benefit from. Its more ‘this person isn’t psychotic or actively suicidal so there is nothing we can offer them’ rather than, ‘this person is consulting me. They are extremely distressed. They don’t understand what is happening to them. How can I help them?’ In our increasingly fragmented health care system everyone is carrying out assessment according to their particular ‘criteria’ while the service user understandably feels they have been ‘assessed to death- when is someone going to help me?’

Can we move away, in mental health care, from this culture of assessment back to one of a consultation, which David Tuckett and his colleagues first described many years ago as the ‘Meeting Between Experts’?

I am the expert in what I am experiencing. You are the expert in what might be effective. In consulting you and providing you with all this very sensitive information about my inner life, I’m an trusting that you as a professional will be able not only to say if you will be able to help me personally, but also that you will do your best to help me access what I need.

I really need your assistance now to navigate this increasingly hostile system of care. I am asking for your help.

Strategies for Living

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In the last few weeks, while I’ve been largely alone in Orkney, I’ve been aware of having to cope with my mood and thoughts from day to day and reading about how people with mental health problems cope on Twitter and support each other.

I’ve also been reminded of something I read many years ago.

At the turn of the millennium, the Mental Health Foundation carried out some service user research and produced a report called ‘Strategies for Living.’ Over 400 people had completed Knowing our own Minds – a user-led survey of alternative and complementary treatments and therapies in mental health and Strategies for Living reported the findings from interviewing 71 people with experience of mental health problems in depth. This was a really positive piece of work, which highlighted the particular activities and experiences which people with mental health problems found helpful in coping with their everyday lives: from on-going survival strategies, such as the need for financial security to crisis strategies such as making contact with friends or professionals, ways of controlling symptoms such as taking medication, having therapy, taking exercise or using a Walkman (yes it is a few years old) to distract from hearing voices, to ‘healing strategies’ through religion and spiritual beliefs to complementary therapies.

Relationships with others were key. Several common themes could be identified:

• Acceptance
• Shared experience… shared identity
• Emotional support… ‘being there’
• A reason for living
• Finding meaning… and purpose
• Peace of mind… and relaxation
• Taking control… having choices
• Security… and safety
• Pleasure

Mental health services were largely absent from the accounts that people offered although some individual professionals clearly offered a great deal of valued support

Why am I reminded of this now?

How we cope from day to day is a very personal phenomenon. There are of course some common strategies that people find helpful and these were the ones reported in Strategies for Living.

However there are also some other ways of coping that were not reported in here. The strategies that people do not always want to admit to. I know some of these intimately. Despite growing up in a household of heavy smokers, I’ve never tried a cigarette, but I watched my father consume 40 a day as his own personal way of keeping life at bay. Excessive drinking is something I’ve always suspected I could sink into and I’ve consciously tried to cut down in recent months. It isn’t always easy. I spent some of my career working in alcohol services and I know how hard it can be to withdraw from alcohol and other substances. But there are other ways too that we cope with how we feel: eating, or not, over exercising, self-harm and self-injury , spending every night out on the town or shutting ourselves away completely from the world to the point that we feel completely isolated and ultimately brooding about strategies for dying rather than living. Suicidal thoughts are themselves a coping strategy. Knowing there is a way out when it all gets just too much.

My concern with much of the self-help literature, some of which sits on my own bookshelf unopened, is that it makes various assumptions:

  • We actually want to change, and stop using the sometimes self-destructive ways of coping we find helpful in day to day survival.
  • We can find the resources to be able to do that.
  • We have the material resources and social capital to be able to adopt some of the positive strategies people suggest to us, such as time, money and a place to live to start off with.

Its difficult to adopt new ways of coping until you have acknowledged what you will lose in giving up the other strategies, the ones health professionals would prefer you to unquestionably ditch. Such positive ways of coping cannot be prescribed (such as in the advice to ‘go home and have a warm bath and a cup of tea’ that currently seems beloved of some crisis support teams- actually I didn’t  see these even mentioned in Strategies for Living either). Health professionals need to start from where we are at now. What have we found helpful in the past? What do we do now to cope? What is difficult about changing ? And avoid being judgmental if they want us to be honest.

The problem with feeling depressed is that it involves rumination. Indeed in some cultures it is considered to be a problem of ‘thinking too much’. We become aware of our thoughts, and struggle to cope with them minute by minute. I certainly have some obsessional features to my thinking, and I’m aware that if the day doesn’t go ‘right’ in some often hard to clarify way, I can feel as though everything has gone ‘very wrong’. I have to mentally restart the day in some way. These thoughts can be painful and repetitive and I seek ways to avoid them. Distraction is probably the most effective way I’ve found and I deeply resent that some psychologists I’ve met seek to denigrate such an effective coping strategy as a ‘safety behaviour’ in CBT speak. Hell- give me a break- it’s what I find helpful!

There are many different strategies for living and quite a few for dying.
Help me to find the ones that fit me best to help me survive.
Don’t advise, lecture or proselytize.

The friends and family test

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Not long ago the NHS introduced a patient feedback test asking people if they would recommend a service to their friends and family. I may have missed it, but I would have thought we should really be asking staff too if they would suggest that their friends or loved ones might want to use the mental health service in which they work? Would they be satisfied enough with the quality of care?

Supporting colleagues who are themselves suffering from mental health problems or have family members in need of help is always eye-opening. In some places it’s really hard to get through the barriers to care and access the kind specialist advice and help a person would really benefit from. I’ve been lucky in that, despite not being psychotic or actively suicidal (colleagues may disagree about the psychotic, I get fairly paranoid when I am really down) I’ve generally managed to get therapy when I’ve needed it. I have good GP care. I went privately for cognitive-behavioural therapy not only because of the impossible wait where I live, but because I wanted to see someone who knew something about depressive rumination.  Even then, having helped me a great deal, he generously refused to accept payment from a fellow professional. I know most people are not quite as lucky as I have been.

Getting access to mental health care these days seems to depend on whether you want to kill yourself imminently or if you are hearing voices telling you to kill someone else. My colleagues in psychiatry get annoyed with me when I say you only need to ask these two questions now in the mental state assessment, but how easy is it really to see someone who can provide specialist advice on a serious mood disorder before you are at the end of your tether? Waiting list for psychological therapies are long, and they often don’t have parallel advice available to them for reviewing the often complicated medications that people are on and may have been taking for years. NICE guidelines say both should be available in severe depression, yet if you are under the care of the community mental health team (CMHT) some psychological therapies services will not see you until you are discharged from the care of the CMHT. I’ve heard this several times now. Why is this allowed to go on? It is contrary to national guidance. If it were happening for serious physical illness it would be a subject of a Radio 4 report. If people cannot access care when they are in the early stages of relapse, it is hardly surprising that they reach the point where detention sometimes seems to be the only option to those trying to care for them.

Do people who get depressed who work in mental health care have the same problem getting help? What do they think when they are told bluntly don’t ‘you don’t meet our referral criteria’ and get sent back to a GP who is asking for expert advice because he or she doesn’t know what else to do? Do they demand access and get it? Are they as lucky as I have been, because I think I have been fortunate to access skilled and high quality care.  I know it can be done if there is a will.

I’ve pretty much worked in the community the last few years, but I’ve visited a lot of mental health units to talk to people about taking part in research. You only have to walk into a cancer unit, as I did not so many months ago to visit a friend, to be shocked at the gross disparity between the physical environments that people with mental health problems, and those who work with them, have to tolerate when compared with those who have physical illness.  I know the entrance hallway isn’t always what the hospital is actually like inside, and the care provided in acute units has not escaped criticism either. We have the Francis Report after all.  Nevertheless I cannot help feeling that the state of our shrinking, poorly staffed, ill-resourced and physically unappealing mental health units, separated as they were from physical health care a decade ago in the new Mental Health Trusts, are a sign of where our priorities lie as a society. I cannot imagine recommending that a member of my family should be treated in one now, although I have at other times in the past.

I’d be fascinated to hear from anyone who works in mental healthcare who would be perfectly happy for friends or family with severe mental illness to be (hypothetically at least) treated in their own service. Take the test.