This weekend is my daughter's first birthday. With all the celebration there is another side to this important date for me. The perinatal mental health team only looks after women who are pregnant and up to the first year of the child's life. So I am bring discharged to the back to the community mental health team.
This handover is somewhat of a double edged sword for me. On the one hand this is a good thing, it means that I am better, well on the way to being stable and well again. However the perinatal team have been the the very best mental health service I have ever encountered, in fact possibly the best NHS service I have ever used. They have kept all appointments, visited me regularly, looked after me with care and sensitivity during my inpatient stay. Between them they rebuilt my confidence, got me back to work and helped me rebuild some normality in my family life. They have laughed with me and cried with me, and got me psychological therapies that I have been waiting for for over three years. I cannot express in words how wonderful they are and how grateful I am to them and all they have done for me and my family.
On the flip side community mental health services have been somewhat hit and miss. There was the time that I was first referred to mental health services and spent months being pushed back and forward between different services- one claiming that I was too unwell to be seen by then and the other saying I wasn't ill enough. I was referred twice for CBT and therapy and was lost on the list when the service reshuffled from South to South East to East. At 32 weeks pregnant I changed Psychiatrist (after another reshuffle) and it was only then that I was referred to perinatal (despite the guidelines stating I should have been referred immediately). And finally there was the community psychiatric nurse (CPN) who was brushed off my comments about hallucinating (it would cause a lot of paperwork) and reported me (wrongly) to social care against the advice of my perinatal CPN and psychiatrist.
In many ways I will be glad that this 'year' is over. It is been the hardest I have ever known and has tested the limits of my mental and emotional strength, as well as my relationships with family and friends. What I do know is that the year wold have been made much worse without the wonderful work of the perinatal team at The Mount. They do amazing things every day with very little in the way of resources. In the whole of Yorkshire there is one mother and baby unit which has five beds. Five. The next nearest is Newcastle of Manchester. They didn't just hand out pills and feed me. They nourished me, they supported me and they gave me the confidence to drag myself out of depression. Mental health services are often described as the 'Cinderella service' and if that is true they are the fairy godmother, because they made so much our of very little. If only all mental health services could be so good.
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