Professionals know mental health is complex – and MDMA won’t help | Letters
Rose Cartwright’s article (I was the poster girl for OCD. Then I started questioning everything I was told about mental illness, April 13) claims to expose “the fallacy at the heart of mental health care,” with the argument that the sector – including but not limited to psychiatrists, occupational therapists, social workers, employment advisers, psychologists, dementia nurses, practitioners, nursing home staff, art therapists, carers and support staff – is failing to understand the multi-faceted nature of mental health care and is reducing its instead towards a disease/treatment model.
I was part of a recent multidisciplinary team meeting. A psychiatrist shared their concerns about patients becoming homeless and asked what could be done. To which a counselor responded that funding had just been cut for the local homelessness agency – a key resource for such patients. Everyone, including the psychiatrist, slumped in their chairs, knowing that homelessness is a powerful risk factor for addiction, mental health crises and suicide. Without such organizations, these risks often become reality.
Those who work in mental health are all too aware of the misconception at play: that good mental health can be maintained while the wider social infrastructure (housing, education, employment, social care) is destroyed.
Still, the idea that mental health professionals are simply hapless lemmings wandering around a dusty, old medical model wasn’t my main problem with this article. My main problem was the suggestion that MDMA might be more useful than regulated care for mental health problems. I have seen a number of patients who were sectioned and admitted for drug-induced psychosis. One of these patients had used MDMA and unfortunately had a young child who needed to be supervised while their parent recovered.
The author of the article clearly understands the profound impact this is likely to have had on this child. Can she please be a little careful about what she writes and therefore promotes, and The Guardian about what it publishes.
Dr. Rachel McNulty
Junior doctor, training as a psychiatrist, Ramsgate