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Look! Here is a picture of me and my good friend Byron Vincent. We’re just hanging out under the M32, casually pretending to chat about stuff whilst a photographer from The Guardian captures the moment.
Click on the photo to read our thoughts about NHS psychiatric wards. And thank you to all of those who have left comments – it’s great to be part of this important conversation.
As a consultant psychiatrist, now mainly retired, I thought your Guardian article was spot on. I’d like to send you a paper I wrote last year for the NHS COnsultants Association, on the mental health services in England. My contention is that we had a good service, but it peaked in the late 90’s and has been increasingly downhill ever since. I see a lot of it: I sit on mental health Tribunals. If you’re interested – its only about 3000 words – send me an email address.Regards
I thought this was en excellent article. My family has experienced much the same through a loved one going through a crisis. How we care for the most vulnerable is a mark of our society. And the signs for the UK are not good. Thank you to both of you for the article. I found it helpful
I am so pleased and grateful that you have highlighted the decimation of the mental health services. The emphasis upon meeting targets and the dismantling of services that have taken years to develop bodes badly for the future. Having been a mental health nurse for 34 years, I hardly recognise the service following the changes over the last five years.
I’m in the middle of reading The Shock of the Fall and have experienced the growing realisation that I know the mental health unit you are describing. I worked on all the acute in-patient wards there as a care assistant for 7 years in the 1990’s. I just read your Guardian article and was saddened to learn that the unit at Southmead is closing. Even when I worked there the unit was often overfull and chaotic at times but it had only just been built so was a much better environment than some of the more old-fashioned places that mental health patients could still end up in in Bristol at the time. It seems a bizarre decision to close a modern, purpose-built unit when in-patient beds have become so scarce.
I left to train as a social worker as I could not cope any longer with the institutional hierarchy of hospitals. I met one of the ex-patients while I was training and we agreed that we’d both escaped in one way or another. The place you describe for respite and escape from the world that in-patient beds can offer is not perfect but it can be better than being left to the loneliness and ignorance of the crowd.
I’m really glad that you have written such a powerful novel that describes so powerfully similar experiences to those that brought the people I met to hospital as these are rarely the voices that get heard.
Hi Nathan. I just came across your blog via Mumsnet. I’m about to start reading your book, and looking forward to it. As someone who has a diagnosis of schizophrenia (I’m afraid I am stuck with it, although I have long since recovered) I am always interested in reading about the subject. It seems that you have more understanding than most of mental health – although personally, the more I learn about it the less I seem to understand. People have such vastly different experiences of mental distress. I can’t help wishing that more mental health professionals would confess to all that they don’t know about the conditions and the cures! Regards, Louise