Some of the people who read my blog will already know, last year my grandson had a crisis in his mental health which was triggered by drugs, in his case a mixture of cocaine (cut with who knows what,) very high strength weed and we know not what else. He was extremely unwell and one year later slips in and out of different states of ok-ness and not ok-ness. He cannot settle anywhere for very long so he has become a serial transient which makes it more difficult for us to help him. His mother has bust a gut to sort out accommodation for him, but he reports back that it is always unsatisfactory and the places are full of “the dark side.” She has researched mental health services in depth and offered him various options of therapy none of which he tries. We flit from one idea to another already knowing he probably won`t do anything we suggest. He has taken himself off all medication and struggles a lot, to achieve a sense of normality in his life. We`re at an impasse and have sometimes come to blows, as a family, over how we should proceed from here. Mental health impacts not just on the person who is unwell, it impacts on their whole family. Services across the UK are sparse and certainly in our experience, not terribly helpful, so it is unsurprising that our homeless hostels and prisons are full of men and women who cannot find a way to `get better` and manage their symptoms, whatever they may be. Lots of people self-medicate with drink or drugs or both and for many this will work and for the rest it will exacerbate those very symptoms that trouble them the most.
I recently had an interesting conversation with the matron of Oleaster Psychiatric Hospital in Birmingham. A lovely, warm, engaging and compassionate man he said that most of the people who come into the hospital on a mental health section are young men who are often so high from street drugs, the hospital has to first manage their come down and then wait, often for weeks for individuals to have settled enough to begin to work with them in any kind of useful way. He explained that many dealers are manufacturing new and increasingly stronger chemical highs usually in their own houses. It is almost impossible for health staff to keep up with what new drugs are being designed or their chemical content, how they will affect the individual`s thoughts and behaviours and so it is inceasingly difficult to offer antidotes that will help. It terrifies me, drugs terrify me, but legalising drugs would reduce the need for people who want to use drugs to have to approach dodgy dealers and would certainly be helpful to extremely vulnerable people like my grandson who are currently preyed upon by those who are pretending to be their friend. “The drugs are free, go on mate have some, you can pay me back when you next get your benefits.” Dealers rely on people running up huge debts of hundreds of pounds to ensure their money keeps on rolling in. The people they prey upon then are then coerced to commit crimes of various degrees of seriousness in order to get more money for more drugs. It`s a horrible scenario.
Our family has sometimes begun to fragment under the weight of worry and there are very few services for families like us so we have to remain strong and hold each other. Oleaster run a family support group and when we visited it, there was only us and one other regular but it still helps to get other perspectives on the issues we are facing with our grandson. So I don`t know what the future holds for our beloved boy-man, it often seems rather bleak, we are certainly not in a sprint, we are in a marathon but I was heartened by the matron who said as we were leaving, “Many people will go on to work out quite a lot for themselves simply by trial and error. So eventually they moderate the habits and behaviours that repeatedly make them unwell, unpopular, broke and unhappy, so take heart, the likelihood is that it will eventually pass.”
A night in with Nelly 