“It will be good for you to talk to someone” - Mental health and the care experience
When I was 12, my dad died. I hadn’t seen him for years - he found it too painful coming to visits and had succumbed even further to his addictions - aside from a surreal outing together two weeks before his death which perhaps he had had a premonition of. It was a terrible time in my life but I was desperate to carry on as normal. There was already so much in my life that made me feel different and it was easier to just get on with things and block out the sadness.
Photo by Ant Belle
Around this time, my foster mother told me I was going to the Tavistock (a specialist children’s mental health service in London). “It will be good for you to talk to someone”, my social workers kept saying, but at the time I didn’t even connect this strange new development to my dad’s death. I’d be picked up early from school and taken there to sit in a room and be asked questions that I usually refused to answer. I didn’t understand why I needed this and didn’t want to talk about the feelings that I had been working so hard to distance myself from. After a few months the appointments stopped as suddenly as they had started, and no one ever spoke to me about the experience again.
My only other experience of mental health services was 16 years later, in an adult ADHD assessment clinic. Having been told by colleagues that my focus in meetings left something to be desired, I completed the obligatory 2 years on the waiting list and eventually was sent an appointment date along with a stack of questionnaires. There was a lot of focus on my childhood and so I turned to what few social work files I had. They’re not easy reading but I was optimistic, seeing this as an opportunity to talk about the ways in which my early experiences continue to impact me today. The appointment itself was such a disappointment: a nurse with a checklist going through my symptoms, the files I offered to show her waved away without a glance. I walked away crestfallen, my precious files in one hand and a meaningless diagnosis in the other.
I don’t blame social services for the Tavistock experience; I believe they genuinely wanted to help albeit in a rather clumsy way. If they had asked, perhaps I would have been able to tell them that it wasn’t something I wanted. I see now that I needed time to process what had happened: a process that is still ongoing today.
There’s more that can be done at the other end however. When you leave care as a young adult, it feels like a door shuts on you. Any fast-tracked access to therapy that social workers are able to magic up (I am not a specialist in these matters!) does not exist and you’re left to navigate the labyrinth of adult mental health services, where your care experience is often overlooked and misunderstood.
I don’t know what the solution is for this, but it’s something I feel needs to be spoken about more. There’s a proportion of care leavers who have significant difficulties requiring intensive support from specialist services (PTSD, addictions and other serious mental illness), but with limited resources for “lower level” problems such as depression, there’s likely many thousands of care experienced people out there who are unable to access the support they need.