Poor, poor, pitiful me. Well, not quite, but having shelled out an arm and a leg getting an ADHD assessment and then diagnosis, and having saved the NHS a few bob by going privately, I thought there might be something the NHS could offer me by way of treatment. Maybe it is poor, poor, pitiful me after all. Because, having already been told by my GP that while ADHD drugs might have some positive effects if I took them, they would also raise my blood pressure still further so they were not an option. However, it gets better, or should I say worse? Having researched the matter, the health centre has confirmed there is nothing, bugger all, zilch that can be done for me. The upshot is this: I’ve got ADHD, I’ve always had it and there is nothing the NHS can do. Was it really worth it?
It feels like that on balance it was worth the hassle and worth the money to at least get some kind of explanation as to why I’ve never been able to cope with so many things. I know, what I’ve always known: that something was different about me. I didn’t know what, but now, late in life, as I am ever closer to knocking on heaven’s door (even though I don’t believe in one), I now know the truth. Having finally bitten the bullet and having had an assessment, I suppose I was expecting if not a cure then some way(s) of lessening its effects. I was wrong. Beyond here, as Bob Dylan and Robert Hunter put it, lies nothin’.
I suppose I had hoped for more. ADHD makes life so tiring and tiresome and I suppose i expected the post diagnosis world would be easier to navigate. But it isn’t and the odds are it won’t be. The NHS, our greatest British institution, offers assessments, if you are prepared to wait up to six years for an appointment, but that is apparently as far as it goes. I can’t have drugs and there is no NHS therapy. As with the assessment itself, I’ll have to contact the parasitic private health care sector if I want any kind of therapy. I feel slightly sick. It was all I could do to have a private assessment but now to consider spending large fortunes on private therapy – I just don’t know what to do.
It would be strange indeed to seek private therapy for ADHD when I have steadfastly refused to go down that road for my clinical depression. It’s not just my antipathy to private health, but there’s also an in-built fear that if I spent vast sums of money on therapy and things did not improve I think I’d get even more sick.
I didn’t really need reminding that mental health is little more than an irritation for this government, which has essentially defunded treatment to the nothingness level that exists today. So often we hear that mental health will be treated with the same importance as physical health, only to find that they didn’t mean it. It was no more than a soundbite of the time and we’d soon forget about it.
It looks like the end of the road now. I’ve tried everything I can and now there’s nothing left. What’s my advice to anyone else in a similar position?
Put simply, prepare for the worst. If you’re a woman or man of means, by all means pay for your therapy. If you’re a woman or man of no means, you’re out of luck and out of time. Poor, poor, pitiful me.
