Share review of Warneford Hospital

Warneford Hospital 2020-12-03 Person 3 5 0

I'm grateful that they provided the thing I needed to make sure that I stayed alive through an acute problem. I'm less happy that beyond that they couldn't provide any continuity of care or even formal referrals for my underlying chronic issues.

I feel like I'm in a catch-22 where my mental health problem means that I don't have the capacity to fight to access services that would fix problems that are chronically reducing my life expectancy, but can easily be made well enough after those issues make me acutely ill, so that nobody else has responsibility to do that for me either. Also, I was mostly petrified of psychiatrists before the appointment - because caregivers had made them they bogey man to help control my behaviour - so going through the process has shifted that impression to benignly useless, helpful sometimes. I'm not sure that's a good outcome, because being more afraid of the system than holding still in my emotions until I thought I was ill enough that they/I might kill me was probably what was protecting me from self harm. So they've kept me alive, made suggestions that aren't going to fix the underlying problem any time soon, assuming that I can get access to them at all, not made it any easier to access support when my problem gets acutely bad again and probably made me more vulnerable next time it happens. It's a mixed bag.