This Is The Truth About Why I Left Mental Health Services

The Dream

At one point in my life, I had a dream. That dream was to help people. Mentally.

It started with a fascination, as I learned about the mind. Not the brain. Not the physical thing, but the mental part of it all.

• How it cracks, and how it doesn’t.
• How it breaks and how it builds.
• How it is strong, yet fragile.

It truly fascinated me, and it still does.

That was my dream! To learn how the mind worked, and how I could help people and help them find their way back to the most important thing:

Themselves

I Was Not Prepared For The Journey Ahead.

I left school with rock-bottom grades and a high libido.

I left school not knowing what the hell I wanted to do.

I left school with absolutely nothing to direct me.

It all seemed so confusing at the time. What should I do with my life? What should I do with my time? What am I expected to do?

Nothing was clear.

I went from job to job and my decision-making was piss-poor at best. Then, in my early twenties, I finally realised the above. I wanted to learn the mind.

I wanted to be a:

Therapist

The Journey Starts

As Lao Tzu once said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step."

Well, my thousand miles was about to begin.

My biggest hurdle was, as I mentioned earlier, my grades were terrible. They were so low that I couldn’t even get into college.

You see, over in the UK, I'm not sure about now, but we got GCSE’s from school, and the best I got was a…wait for it…

Grade D A damned D. I think the lowest was a G.

So, that did nothing for me. My first steps therefore had to be to get the equivalent of ‘A levels’ so that I could get myself into university.

That’s how I started. Here’s the path I took:

1. Go to do study and tests to get an ‘A level equivalent’ certificate for Maths and English.
2. The certificates got me into an ‘Access to Higher Education’ course at college.
3. 1 year of intense study at college, and studying every pissing thing I should have learned in school, and I had my diploma.

My diploma gained me offers from three universities.

• York University
• Birmingham University
• Sheffield University, my hometown

I had direction. I had a purpose. I had hope. I had…

I Had A Vision

That vision landed me on a university course studying Occupational Therapy, and I chose to study in my hometown.

I loved it at the time.

I also worked in the NHS mental health sector, first as a volunteer to gain a support worker qualification, then as a paid support worker. I did this at the same time as studying, and it was hard work. But rewarding.

As I said, I had a vision: I would be an experienced, front-line therapist in mental health services.

That became my goal.

Reality Can Be Very Different

I used to love working in mental health services in the NHS. It was fascinating, fulfilling, and tremendous all at the same time.

I have tons and tons of stories for other articles later, but for now, I’ll say that…

My interest waned

After working in mental health services, I started to realise what was happening in the sector as time went forward.

• Doctors gained more power.
• Support staff (me) lost all power.
• Nurses lost most of their power.

Now you might wonder why or if power is important in this kind of work, but that would mean you are misunderstanding what I'm saying.

The lack of power of support workers in mental health settings results in them being disrespected by patients, (especially forensic ones) and often results in assault.

We're not talking about power, muhahaha, I mean sort of, authority if you like. The lack of this for Nurses meant that they often ended up getting assaulted too.

On the other hand, the doctors gained a lot of power and that meant one thing:

Their house, their rules.

Ultimately, this was the reason I left. There was just, simply, too much change for me to keep up with. The dynamics shifted way too much and it began to feel dangerous.

Where once my opinion mattered, in just two years our opinions as trained staff meant nothing against the will of the patients or doctors. Nothing.

When I began in mental health services, the actions of forensic patients had consequences. If they assaulted someone they would lose access to something or another. Instead, this more often than not resulted in nothing at all.

My time there taught me one thing. Times were changing for the worse.

Everything became about the patients, and the patients knew that. They took advantage of it. The doctors bent over backwards to make some of the most ridiculous things you can imagine happen.

Everything became about the patient. Everything.

And so, I left.

Once, mental health services, like me, had a vision. Now……they are lost.

______________

That’s It For Now

I’m not going to add any more to this article for now. If you guys want more of my stories in this area, I’ll write more on it if there’s interest.

Thanks for reading,

~Tyler Woden~