There have been two documentaries on television this week that have really highlighted just how bad things can be for people with mental health problems and disabilities.
The first was Panorama shown on BBC 1 on Monday 10.4.16 and dealt with young peoples in patient psychiatric services or more specifically the lack of facilities for most young people to be treated near to their homes.
The programme focused on Sara, who was placed in a tier 4 (inpatient) unit 130 miles away from homewhich meant her family were only able to see her once a fortnight. Sara was placed in a private hospital at considerable cost to the NHS and her family were told it would be for six weeks, this turned into many months until Sara took her own life in a” cry for help” that went wrong. Sara’s sister very bravely read excerpts from Sara’s diary detailing her depression at being so far away from home and not feeling like she was getting any better. Sara was just 17 when her life ended. The very sad thing is that this is not an isolated case, young people are ending their lives in mental health institutions on a regular basis. What has gone wrong? Why are our young people being shipped hundreds of miles away from home and seemingly left in hospitals that are making vast amounts of money from the NHS. I was lucky, my own daughter has serious mental health problems and spent 3 months in an NHS hospital, but unlike Sara’s family we were near enough to visit every day and as soon as she was deemed well enough to be discharged she came home and has since received intensive out patient support. I am not saying private hospitals are milking the NHS but it is suspicious. My heart goes out to Sara’s family, their daughter should be recovering at home like mine is, all I can do is thank them for being brave enough to share their story which will hopefully make people sit up and think. Mental health can no longer be the poor relation, I don’t want to have to read about another young person not reaching adulthood just because the system is so broken.
Later that evening on Channel 4 Dispatches covered the scandal surrounding assessments for Personal Independence Payments (PIP) carried out by Capita.
The Panorama programme made me very sad but the Dispatches programme made me so angry I was practically foaming at the mouth. Capita are one of three companies paid millions of public money to assess disabled and mentally ill people for the new PIP benefit which replaces Disability Living Allowance, and Dispatches had an undercover reporter who posed as a recruit and secretly filmed the training process and then spent some time shadowing one of Capita’s alleged “best” assessors. This Capita employee bragged about how much money he was making and the fact that he made decisions before people even came into the room, he had no sympathy for the people he was assessing and at one point his manager entered the room and removed the information sheet that was on the notice board advising people of their right to make an audio recording of the assessment as “you don’t want to let them know”. This was a deliberate denial of information and that manager should be sacked. The assessor then broke the data protection act by using his mobile phone to photograph the private details on his computer screen. We were told at the end of the programme that this person is no longer an employee of Capita which is good news but they had earlier described him as “one of their best” which does nothing to improve confidence in this company. I have written about PIP on a number of occasions in our members newsletter RESNEWS which is available to all members of Rescare on a quarterly basis, if anyone would like details please contact enquiries@rescare.org.uk.
The two programmes can be viewed by clicking on the following links.