Updates

Some of this post has been deleted

Some time during the winter months Mr Man’s CPN, Mark, had a job change, so now Mr Man has a new Care Co-ordinator; an Occupational Therapist who we will call Sandy.

Being an Occupation Therapist, she wanted to do something practical to help Mr Man with his anxiety. Since he has already been on every anxiety management course imaginable with little or no success, it was decided that she would go for a walk with Mr Man every two weeks to gradually build up his exposure, and to talk him through how he was feeling during the walk. This seemed like a reasonable plan, and she turned up the following week without an appointment as planned; prior notice would have given Mr Man time to worry about it. That was 3 months ago. This could have been a great opportunity for her to establish a relationship with Mr Man, if she had followed through, but since then she has only come to see Mr Man once, with a trainee in tow.

I think the plan was supposed to be that I was to carry on what she had started, as after the first walk she said “Maybe Mrs Man could go out for a walk with you next week?” and since then there has been no mention of her taking another walk with him. This irritates me because on one hand they are very fond of telling me to step back and that Mr Man has to learn not to be so dependant on me alone, and yet on the other hand they expect me to be the one to support him in all of their wonderful plans for him; not to mention the fact that I don’t always have the physical or emotional energy to undertake these endeavours due to my own health problems.

How do I stop the darkness from rolling in, for Mr Man or myself?

"The Darkness Rolling In" by Philippa King

Mr Man would like to start running regularly, to try to lose some of his medication weight, but this is going to be difficult to put into practice. Obviously he doesn’t feel able to run alone, and I really don’t have the health to support him in that way. It would be nice if someone from the Community Mental Health Team could take half an hour out of their day to run with him, but these people don’t want to give you the practical help that you actually need; they prefer to hold “Well Being” classes to just tell you what you should and shouldn’t be doing – if you can overcome your anxiety to get there in the first place of course. I wonder if this is partly due to wanting to maintain a certain amount of professionalism and emotional detachment, or whether they just don’t care enough to do anything even remotely outside their job description.

More recently Mr Man has been experiencing some fluctuations in his symptoms. We expect this from time to time, but when the symptoms are particularly bad there is usually a trigger, such as a stressful situation. No such situation springs to mind, but the voices have been telling Mr Man to cut himself again. More about that in my next post.