FUCK YOU NHS!
Sorry – that’s a bit harsh, but that’s what I felt like saying when I’d finished on the phone to him: so that’s what I’m bloody saying here!
The background
After learning that my shrink is the head of the psychology department and holds the purse strings for funding all the individual patient care, I realised that he’d been directing me in my therapy into not talking about how angry I was feeling about the hoops I had to jump through to obtain therapy. I also became suspicious that therapy was offered as a result of the formal complaint I started last year; a point they continue to refute because they said that they didn’t need for me to be rereferred to access therapy – despite being told that if you are turned down, you need to be referred again – this they told my GP! I wasn’t referred again by my quack or my GP, and hey presto, three or four weeks after complaining about this, I get a sudden phonecall from the secretary, inviting me to be assessed… Yuh – I have a brain, and I can join dots – get me? The refuting of this undeniable “coincidence” felt like the Trust were relying on me being convinced of my utter mentalism (ie – yuh – I’m paranoid now as well as bi-fucking-polar, borderline ad infinitum bollocks stuff). Not so, and I stand by my original conjecture that they shat themselves a bit when my MP starting poking his nose into their kibosh referral system, and thought that offering me therapy would influence me into perhaps backing off from the complaint or even dropping it completely. Again – not so. I just felt that I was being fiddled with, and that made me more determined to take them to task. Twats.
Naturally, having not even mentioned this complaint to my shrink, I was stunned when he asked me if I had a problem with him being involved in the complaint process during a therapy session we had halfway through last year. ER, ‘scuse me mate? I felt so intimidated by this impingement into my therapy that all I could squeeze out was that I felt it perhaps unwise and slightly inappropriate that he’d been asked. This was further confirmed by my Mum’s incredulous reaction when I mumbled something about it that afternoon – “He used your therapy session to ask you THAT?” But this issue didn’t end there. Not only did I start talking about my eating disorder (which he steered me away from by insisting that I focus on “the ending” of therapy), he also obscured from me that he was the head of his department – which I only found out when my quack let it slip during an appointment with him. I had therapy right after that and frankly, I was so stunned, I didn’t bring it up in conversation with him. Again, I went home and asked my Mum what she thought… She was very suspicious of this because I had mentioned that he kept telling me it was unhelpful to focus upon past treatment (or absence of it) and now I find he’s running the department that I’m complaining about? Conflict of interest or what!
So, when I had my Resolution Meeting in November last year, all this stuff came out. I told them about this conflict of interest and how I suspected there was a reason behind being steered away from thinking about how I’d been treated etc. They couldn’t see how inappropriate it is to have a person’s shrink involved in a complaint’s procedure, when said shrink is head of department. My take on it was to deal with this issue as it would be dealt with in any other line of business would be for the shrink to pass the complaint sideways or up the chain to a senior manager, and that while as head of department he might have sight of the complaint, there was every reason for him to avoid being familiar with the details of the case because of his professional objectivity towards me. It took a full 20 minutes to get the complaints team to understand the ethical ramifications of this… My comment to my advocate when we left was, “Fuck me. Are they thick or what?!”…
Needless to say, joining the dots as I do tend to make it very easy for me to see things that aren’t there. But equally, when I know that there really is something of weight to be considered, I’m like a dog with a bone – and this gave rise to my ire towards my shrink. In short – I feel that he lied to me, possibly agreed to see me to control me through therapy, and then jeopardised my feeling of trust in him by semi-involving himself in a complaint that would have directed itself at him and his senior team.
When he rang this morning, I was like, “Oh fuck. I so don’t want to even talk to you…”, but thickoid Mum decided to give the phone to me when she heard who it was, and so bar cutting him off, I couldn’t not talk to him. I told him I was angry with him as a result of the findings of the resolution meeting, and that because of this, I didn’t want to upset myself by seeing him again. But then something cropped up that I didn’t bank on: I’m owed one more session of therapy – but he’s now decided that I’m not seeing anyone, even though he did say that he’d consider my request for more therapy. I explained that I felt completely unsupported in view of the cessation of therapy, and that I’m now having to attend an eating disorder support group as I can’t afford private therapy and am getting nothing further from the NHS. I also explained that I’d been suicidally depressed in recent days.
All the time he was speaking to me, I just wanted to tell him to fuck off and leave me alone – I didn’t want to see him; what could possibly make him think I wanted to even speak to him. We’ll see what the upshot of this conversation is in due course, but in the interim – FUCK YOU NHS.
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Tags: Eating disorder
Urgh. I wish he hadn’t called me yesterday – I was asleep still when he rang, and Mum lied to say that I was out! What makes this man think that I want to speak to him – I don’t want to see him at all! Why the hell would I want to speak to him? Fuck it. I’ve procrastinated until next week, when I will call, but I think I’m going to be mardy and say that I don’t want to talk to him either, and can someone else handle my case…
