For those of us who weren’t already aware – and I was very unaware – this week is Mental Health Awareness Week. The charity, www.mentalhealth.org, which does excellent work on, well, mental health, has announced that this year’s theme is anxiety. They want to talk about it, we should talk about it, talking about anxiety is the first step in trying to deal with it. Then, on the first day of said week, the BBC airs its Panorama programme Private ADHD Clinics Exposed. And thanks to Panorama, my anxiety levels are on the rise, again. I wrote a blog about this the other day.
I now know that one of the clinics the programme has investigated happens to be the one I paid for my assessment. I had already been on an NHS waiting list for many years and feared I might die before finding out what it was that held me back. My assessment felt, to my untrained eye, to be highly professional and thorough. GPs and therapists had long suggested I seek an assessment and the more time went by, the more I felt I needed to act, even if it meant paying the private vultures of the private health companies. As I expected, the diagnosis indicated moderate to severe ADHD and while I couldn’t do anything about it in terms of treatment – the drugs they recommended were deemed inappropriate by my GP and there is no NHS assistance for post diagnosis folk like me – at least I knew. I’m still pretty sure my diagnosis is real, but Panorama has plunged me into a minor crisis. Should I just leave things as they are or get back in the NHS waiting list and hope I get seen before I shuffle off my mortal coil? Would such an assessment reverse my diagnosis?
It’s worth pointing out that I haven’t actually seen the programme yet and am basing my concerns on the BBC previews, but given they include lengthy contributions by the presenter, Rory Carson, I doubt the content will be very different. It could be there is nothing to worry about, that Carson will add a caveat that not all of us have been ripped off and handed a meaningless diagnosis of a condition we apparently want to have. That’s what it feels like to me. Well, I repeat that I would give anything to not have clinical depression or ADHD or any other crippling illness and condition. I needed to know whether I had ADHD, not just out of curiosity but also out of necessity, to see if I could do anything about it. Barring a lottery win and paying for the best therapy money can buy, there’s nothing I can do about it, but what I don’t need is the seeds of doubt being planted in my mind by a television show, whatever its motives.
Mental Health Awareness week has got off to a shaky start thanks to Panorama, at least for me. Whether by accident or design, Carson has made an uncertain world even more uncertain for many of us. There is certainly a strong argument that documentary makers should go after the government for the chronic underfunding of the NHS in general and mental health services in particular. If the NHS was properly funded in the first place, few of us would seek out private alternatives, but on the face of it this does not appear to be that documentary.
I am strongly opposed to the very principle of private health care because I believe in the founding principles of the NHS and dislike the very idea of people making vast profits at the expense of sick people. But I felt I had no alternative. If Panorama begins that kind of debate, that the NHS should be better resourced, then maybe some good will come out of it. Right now, on the first day of Mental Health Awareness week, it feels like the opposite.
