I wanted help with intrusive thoughts. My GP told me to drink more water.

As we reveal mental health patients languishing in A&E for weeks on end, our editor recalls her own attempt to get urgent help. Plus: Behind the scenes of our investigation, and the team's recs.

Content warning: mentions of suicide.

The first and the last time I went to my GP for a mental health issue, I was having intrusive thoughts about suicide. I had no intention of harming myself, but since I had recently covered several stories about student and celebrity deaths by suicide, my mind kept inventing graphic images related to those events. Initially, it was distracting, but then the frequency of the thoughts increased the more I tried to fight them. My work signed me off for a week and I sought help through my GP.

Those ten minutes with the doctor still shock me to this day. I tried to explain what I was going through - a young journalist, not yet equipped with the language I have today - only to be met with the fact that waiting lists for counselling were long, and that unless I wanted to travel to A&E, all I could do was rest some more. Obviously, I said, I couldn’t, because of the violent nature of the intrusive thoughts. “Well, make sure you’re eating well and drinking plenty of water”, the GP said dismissively, rushed by a long list of other appointments. I was at a loss. And though I eventually got better, through seeking private therapy and getting support from friends and family, I remember thinking just how ill-equipped the NHS was when it came to serious mental health provisions.

This was in 2018. Six years later, I am appalled to see that the situation remains dire. Katherine Hignett’s exclusive story for The Lead this week revealed people experiencing mental health crises urgent enough to go to A&E, end up waiting hundreds of hours for appropriate care. Yes, hundreds: one person, we were told via an FOI request, waited for 376 hours. Imagine being in an A&E – with its tension, its chaos, its tightly packed crowd of strangers, many locked in their own bubbles of pain – for an entire day. Now make that two weeks. And now add spending these two weeks in a state of acute mental distress, constantly assailed by the sights and sounds that would make even a healthy person ill. Some of the people who had to experience that are children. We’ve long known that our barely held-together and underfunded NHS is struggling to support mental health patients as waiting times go up across the whole board, but how much more can this go on? 

Last week, Lord Ara Darzi published a damning investigation into the state of NHS England. “Long waits have become normalised”, he writes. “There were 345,000 referrals where people are waiting more than a year for first contact with mental health services – more than the entire population of Leicester – and 109,000 of those were for children and young people under the age of 18.” Can you picture waiting over a year for your first interaction with a specialised professional and just how much a situation can worsen in 365 days without appropriate help? That’s not all. Darzi outlines that the lack of capital investment – billions that should have been spent to keep pace with other countries in the 2010s – has led to "crumbling buildings" and awful conditions, such as "mental health patients housed in vermin-infested, Victorian-era cells, with 17 men sharing just two showers, and parts of the NHS operating out of decaying portacabins”.

As we continue to hear stories of those falling through the cracks of the UK’s failing mental health services, it's clear that a long-term commitment to funding, access, and reform is needed from the government. Labour promised to give mental health the same attention and focus as physical health in its manifesto, hoping to reduce mental health waiting times by recruiting 8,500 new mental health staff during its first term and providing access to specialist mental health professionals in every school. Yet will that be enough? Now, we wait to see. 

Until then, the government must also be vocal about the tight link between mental health issues and ongoing socio-economic issues in our country: rising inequality, poor working conditions, the housing crisis, discrimination and loneliness. People's mental health isn’t deteriorating without cause. Unlike the Tories before, who had systematically run down the NHS, the Labour Party can make it clear that the state of our public health reflects how well society functions. You can’t fix one without the other. A healthy society is propped up by a strong healthcare system. The more unwell we become, the harder it is for the NHS to get back on its feet.

Note from the team: If you’re struggling with your own intrusive thoughts, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, in both the UK and Irleand, or over email at jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. Youth suicide charity Papyrus can be contacted on 0800 068 4141 or email pat@papyrus-uk.org.

---

Paid subscribers only: Behind the scenes of our investigation, and the team’s recommendations for the week.

---

Katherine Hignett: I knew the hospital disclosures would be bad. I wasn’t prepared for just how awful they were.

How did you get the first lead on this story?