Britain’s appalling neglect of the mentally ill | Letters

I totally agree with Jeremy Walker (I’ve met many Valdo Calocanes. This is how a mental health crisis can lead to tragedy, 20 August). We don’t need another expensive inquiry to hear what we already know. Mental health services are so underfunded that they don’t exist. An inquiry in April found that gross failings amounting to neglect caused the death of my daughter, Lillian Lucas, as an NHS patient in a private psychiatric hospital.

In my opinion, this kind of neglect is systemic in community services. When she became psychotic, my daughter packed a bag for the hospital and asked us and the community team for help. Apart from encouraging her to run a bath and light a candle, no help came – until it came in a police car, when she had injured herself or us.

Our treatment of the most mentally ill in this country is appalling. Ironically, my daughter was a psychiatric nurse. Her passion for caring for others was reflected in the many NHS staff we met. Sadly, crippling underfunding and the systems in place mean that the most mentally ill in our country and their families are neglected.
Maria Curran
Swan Sea

As a father who recently went through the traumatic experience of one of his sons being institutionalised, I can only wholeheartedly agree with Jeremy Walker’s description of the built-in bias in some mental health services against involving family members, and how incredibly unhelpful and damaging that can be.

When my son was recently admitted to hospital, I was encouraged to see posters on the hospital walls and hear from staff about how important it was for them to hear the perspectives of caregivers and family members.

But in reality I felt I had to fight tooth and nail to support my son and have my knowledge respected. While he was in the hospital I had to actively fight against a very opaque system that was essentially gaslighting me.

I was grateful for the help my son received from the generally caring staff, but his stay became much more stressful than necessary for me, my son, and the facility because the facility did not take my voice and my life experiences seriously or value them properly.
Name and address provided

Jeremy Walker is right on all the points he makes in his article, but there is one issue that is often overlooked when this topic is discussed: that of proactive and appropriate medical treatment. Between 0.7% And 1% of the population suffers from schizophrenia or related disorders. Of these, 30% will have treatment-resistant schizophreniafor which there is only one recognized treatment available, clozapine. Yet hardly a quarter of those who qualify for this drug are prescribed it. It does have significant side effects, but they are manageable and it is inexpensive.

If we allocated more resources to proactively assessing and treating people with appropriate medications rather than reactively treating them when they become ill and disruptive, we could get much better mental health outcomes without additional costs. It requires a culture change, but the benefits could be substantial.
David Kitchen
Liverpool