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Xanax and waiting lists: our neglected youth

Self-medication and suicide stalk those left on mental health waiting lists, writes MEGAN BIRCHALL

WE aren’t tackling the adolescent mental health crisis. With waiting times sometimes upwards of six months, young people are being forgotten on waiting lists and, with hospital staff refusing to see them when they do finally present at A&E, is it any wonder that self-harm and suicide rates are increasing among teenagers?

Freedom of information requests are showing that nearly half of the young people assessed as needing care are waiting more than 18 weeks to be seen.

Eighteen weeks for someone who is crying for help, who maybe doesn’t want to be alive, whose feelings are spiralling is a long, long time.

Eighteen weeks can take someone from mentally well to rock-bottom, so imagine what it can to do somebody who is there or nearly there.

Speaking not from my own experience but from that of my friends, so many of us have been left forgotten on Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) waiting lists that, with GPs’ inability to prescribe anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medication to under-18s, we have turned to self-medicating, looking for some way to cope. Prescription drug addictions are becoming a thing of our generation and surely the rise in abuse of drugs such as Xanax and Valium should scream to us that there is clearly some issue that isn’t being addressed.

Frank — a confidential drug abuse advice service — revealed it had received 4,742 calls regarding prescription drugs, with nearly a third of those about benzodiazepines, a group of drugs including Xanax and Diazepam (often sold as Valium.)

This rise in prescription drug abuse shows that people screaming out for help and not receiving it are desperately trying to find some way to cope, turning not to illegal drugs but often to the very prescription drugs they may have received had they got the treatment they so desperately needed.

After speaking to one of the senior members of my neighbouring authority’s clinical commissioning group it is clear that so much of the little funding it does have for adolescent mental health is going towards “preventative care” or the measures that are supposed to be in place to support young people before they get to the point of presenting at A&E with a serious illness.

Now, though I haven’t had the chance to speak to someone in a similar position of seniority, I’m aware that my own area is employing the same tactic. Let me you tell you now — it does not work.

The funding is so meagre that it is so ridiculously hard to access support from these “preventative measures” that I can guarantee that pretty much everyone who requires these measures is unable to access them and allowed to continue to worsen until they are forced to present at A&E, at which point there is so little funding left due to it being spent on “preventative care,” that at times there is literally no-one available to see you for the rest of the night because the demand is so high.

So they send you home and tell you to go back to the GP who had sent off multiple referrals to CAMHS. So you wait for the referral. And you wait. And you wait.

I have known people who have had to wait 18 months to be seen because they have been forgotten. People who have had stints in A&E during this time but are still forgotten. Because all this funding has gone towards preventing a crisis that has already happened.

If this is beginning to seem like an attack on preventative care, that is not the case. In an ideal world, preventative care is a wonderful idea. If the NHS was properly funded to not only be able to handle the current demands of CAMHS but also had adequate funds left over to be able to set up suitable preventative care, then I would be singing its praises.

Of course intervening before we let these young people spiral into a crisis is exactly what we should be working towards — but not with so little funding and not to the detriment of those already in crisis.

The NHS is being forced to choose between the overflowing list of patients within CAMHS and desperate attempts to minimise the number of people who will require that care. By being forced to make that choice — because I can imagine how difficult that must be — they are trying to prevent people from getting to the point where they will require care at the expense of those who already required care getting much worse to the point the might require previously unneeded hospital stays.

If every failed suicide attempt was grouped in with those that succeeded, then maybe we’d be forced to listen, forced to address the crisis in front of our face. Not all attempts result in hospitalisation or a stay in a psychiatric ward. Some end with spending two weeks feeling like death, ironically, barely able to stand up for the first week or leave the house for the second. But because they often aren’t reported, out of fear, out of shame, we are allowed to remain ignorant of this huge crisis that is only worsening unless we become a part of it.

The NHS is forced to try to divvy up an already small mental health budget — as low as 10 per cent of its entire budget in an area close to me.

For those who need to be seen it is such a struggle, such an uphill battle to get the help that you may have been scared of seeking out in the first place, that mental health charity Papyrus reported an increase in young people attempting suicide simply because it can be the only way to get medical attention.

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