How A Path To Follow Was Formed: My Personal Journey Part 1

How A Path To Follow Was Formed: A Journey Through Mental Health System Challenges I started writing this blog post in 2017, around the time of navigating mental health services for our 16 year old son and eventually came to realise a couple of things: no amount of journaling is going to provide me the usual relief I get from writing and by the time I finish describing our experience, other potential families will enter this system under supported. So, I postponed procrastinating on my post and just kept volunteering and working; helping those I could, in ways I could. Yep, it’s now 2019 and last week our son turned 18. At times I didn’t think we’d be lucky enough to see that and although it’s been the hardest, most traumatic journey of our lives so far, we are so proud to have walked (often crawled) through this with him; alongside our other two beautiful sons. With his permission, we share this story, in the hope that it helps others; those navigating the service system, those who still live untouched by such experiences, but willing to learn, those who work within the system and the wider community.  It is also a tribute to him and our whole family; what we have faced, accepted and battled, as part of this journey, to be where we are today.  I have finally realised there will never come a time where our journey will make complete sense or, in some ways, be over.  We are a family still in tack; forever different and living separately but surviving and learning to enjoy the precious small moments that come our way. The mental health challenges our son faced and continues to face, along with the associated trauma and grief experienced by our family, are the determining factors, along with my professional experience in the field, in deciding to turn my volunteer initiative into a small business. Young People, families, community need more; need it differently and if we wait around for the royal commission into mental health report and implementation of those recommendations, thousands of more lives will be lost and more of our community will struggle to live with mental health challenges without appropriate support. I never, even as a parent who experienced mental health challenges, and as a professional with sound knowledge of the mental health system, could have foreseen the complexity, the gut wrenching pain, the drawn out time and sheer shock and trauma of what we were about experience and as a result, put our child through; vicariously traumatising our whole family unit along the way. So, what did we learn and why has this resulted in the launch of our peer support mentoring program, championed by lived experience?  Let me describe our Journey and hopefully it will become clear…   The major learnings That it’s not all bad; let me be up front. Although our journey was horrid and traumatising, there were shining lights in that journey, which enabled us to keep going. Here I talk of the Adult Alfred CATT team we had to consult out of hours & advocated for us from first phone call to eventual admission, the Austin hospital staff and one important member of Monash inpatient unit, who realised keeping our child as an inpatient was going to do more harm than good… We fully recognise and respect that there are good mental health clinicians, all of whom are working under constant funding model restrictions and resourcing pressures, for the good of our community. Lesson: Like every workplace; there are great staff and not so great staff. Unlike other fields, though, there is ALWAYS additional pressures they all work under due to the very nature of our country’s lack of commitment to mental health. Our Model: Committed to working with these awesome staff, who cannot, even if they wanted to, provide everything a young person and family need, in terms of support. Schools are not readily equipped or supported to effectively manage complex mental health challenges and suicide. Our son’s journey really began when he and his fellow students were largely left unsupported after the death by suicides of two of their classmates, within 12 months. Lesson: Sometimes the education system can still see behaviours related to mental well-being challenges as simply “naughty” and are not given sufficient mental well-being support to effectively guide our students. Our Model: Committed to advocacy with schools, on behalf of young people and their families. The youth semi acute system (where patients with more complex challenges are referred) also work under continual pressure and as a result, can fail those in need of their services to prevent them from entering the acute hospital system. We first sought their services close to discovering our son’s experiences of panic attacks, self-harming and voices telling him to hurt himself. On assessment he was deemed not acute enough to become a client of their service. He was justifiably scared, lied and/or minimised his symptoms, alone in a room with professional strangers. Even after we explained that we thought he was lying it was recommended we seek private psychology. Lesson:  The threshold to enter our acute (hospital) and sub-acute (CYMHS) has increased dramatically; to the point that you either need to be immediately deemed you will hurt yourself. Our Model: Not catchment bound, nor bound by any funding model that determines who we support, how long we support for and how that support looks. Flexible and customised. We did seek private psychological service. It seemed to work for a while, or did it? Turned out that our son went on hiding and minimising his symptoms, again justifiably in our current society, until he could no longer. Upon disclosing his voices; he was immediately deemed too complex for the current service and psychiatric intervention was recommended. There was no risk assessment completed; he couldn’t tell me who our son’s voices were telling him to hurt…only that they were.  I had to find that out, in the car,