Care in the community.

I've been under services for five years now and yet it is only in the last 8 months that I have received a decent level of care. During this time I have been quite unwell at times, I have been sectioned, assessed under the mental health act I believe 18 times. Had 7 admissions to psychiatric wards. I have had ten care co-ordinators I have moved CMHT 4 times. All this has no doubt added to my instability. At the moment my mental health is very good- the best it has been throughout this period and this is because I am under the perinatal psychiatric team. I see my care co-ordinator weekly and we have been working on how I can identify my mood swings and prevent relapse. You would think I would have been through this with one of my previous nine CCOs but no. It took having a baby and changing teams for me to get this care so in many ways having a baby has saved me. The thing is I can only stay with the team for a year post partum so I have a few month left with them before I get pushed back to the terrible team I had before who I had to complain about, who never came to see me, who never engaged with me when in crisis let alone tried to work on relapse prevention. That's if I am even meet the threshold for a return to their team. I would like to think I don't need their care, that I can leave secondary services or just see the psychiatrist but the problem is when things go wrong they go wrong quickly. And crisis services in my area are not really any better. It really is cheaper to invest in decent community services then foot the bill for people to get continually assessed and admitted. The problem is everyone has their own pot of money to save and they don't look at the bigger picture. Community services don't care if inpatient wards have to pay to look after people at ridiculous rates, nor does the CMHT care if crisis now have to visit you daily because they neglected you for weeks. I don't really see things getting better on that front.

New Start

Its been a while since I properly blogged on my old blog http://thedepressiondescent.blogspot.co.uk/ and although there is over four years worth of posts there I feel things have moved on so rather than pick it up there I have decided to start a new blog here. For those of you who have never come across my blog, I will explain the new title. I have a diagnosis of Bipolar disorder. This means I have periods of extremely low mood/depression and other periods of high or elated mood. The 'When she wears red lipstick' is something a care co-ordinator/cpn once said to me she said that when I am high, Which I have been for over 50% of the last five years then she always knows immediately because I wear reed lipstick. I tend to think its just that I don't bother much with makeup when my mood is low but I thought it would be an interesting new title so there you go. A little more about me. I am a 31 year old mother of two living in the East midlands. Currently on maternity leave but in three months of my return I will hopefully be a qualified social worker having worked hard to cross the difficult divide between service user to professional, or perhaps straddling the two at times. That's all for now.