Mental health: NHS crisis lines failing to answer suicide calls

8 comments
  1. The article also mentions this but even when they *do* answer, their advice is so awful I’ve seen memes about it on tiktok. I got told “to try having a nice cup of tea and a bath”. I told her that I don’t like tea and I hate baths. She didn’t have any other ideas. I said that even if I did like them, it wouldn’t help – I wanted to die, I had plenty of good reasons not to be here, and I’d reached that point where you are totally and utterly convinced everyone that you love would be better off without you. I’d even written a suicide note to my cats as stupid as that sounds.

    I’m not mad at NHS staff though, I just hate that this is the world we live in now and I worry where it’s headed.

    I see a lot of friends complaining online atm, making posts that say things like, “People say they care about mental health but when you really need someone, they aren’t around. They just disappear and don’t even bother to reach out. They’re fake friends.”

    And I get why they feel that way, but last year I was on hold to the Samaritans at 4am and I decided to message the only friend showing as being online. I told her I was in a bad way and asked if I could talk. She said “sorry I’m not able to, I’m in a bad way myself and I’m on hold to the Samaritans at the moment.”

    And that’s why we haven’t just lost mental health support from the NHS. It’s bigger than that. We’ve lost the ability to properly support our friends when they need us because we need so much support ourselves.

  2. Can you imagine how hard that job is? All day everyday speaking to strangers who say they want to die? Give them a break sheesh.. be glad there is such a line at all. Plenty of countries don’t even have that

  3. Crisis teams are desperately underfunded people answering those calls at 3am in a morning are paid less than people stacking shelfs at tesco at 3am in a morning.

    When it comes to advice yes people complain advice is shit but realistically we get posts like this

    >The article also mentions this but even when they do answer, their advice is so awful I’ve seen memes about it on tiktok. I got told “to try having a nice cup of tea and a bath”. I told her that I don’t like tea and I hate baths. She didn’t have any other ideas. I said that even if I did like them, it wouldn’t help – I wanted to die, I had plenty of good reasons not to be here, and I’d reached that point where you are totally and utterly convinced everyone that you love would be better off without you. I’d even written a suicide note to my cats as stupid as that sounds.

    But OP didn’t die, purpose of the bath isn’t that it magically stops suicide it is that it conversation about bath distracted OP enough that they didn’t end their life that night. Goal was accomplished. Noone can treat your depression over a phone it takes months if not years to get you stable crisis team isn’t treatment team it’s what it says on a tin crisis and suicide prevention team

    Crisis is a Band aid for a wider mental health problem they are A&E of mental health. Goal of crisis isn’t to cure your depression it is too keep you alive long enough so you can access specialist care in community or inpatient teams. However problem is that thanks to 12 years of tory access to this care is hard. I work in community mental health I only now get to see people for therapy that I have assessed in September

    This is what you get if you pay peanuts. Everyday we need to attend 30 min briefing meeting of all mental health services the most common sentence reported by everyone of them is “We are short of staff today” which isn’t shocking at all considering how crap pay is and you are expected to have magic power of stopping suicide with 1h meeting every 2 weeks or a phone call when you work in crisis team and if you fail on that magic power you can lose a job and end up in prison for neglect

  4. Serious question – if someone is adamant on killing themselves and there’s nothing to convince them, why expend resources on them? Not to say we shouldn’t but how successful are these efforts?

  5. Surely the line is still doing it’s job if this person called 7 times, didn’t get through but in the end didn’t off themselves and gave an interview to BBC news instead?

  6. Crisis team is a joke. I had a night in hospital after taking an overdose. Crisis team saw me in the morning, decided I was no longer a risk to myself and discharged me with a referral to their urgent group cbt program. It was about 4 months before I heard anything else, 5 months before cbt started.

    I’d taken the overdose when my daughter was 3 months and my son was about 18 months. Because I had a history of depression, post partum depression was never mentioned. Honestly, I think I didn’t take another overdose because my night in hospital was so damn awful. No one came to see me. I wasn’t told I’d be staying overnight. I had to ask for a gown so I didn’t have to sleep in my clothes. I was on my period but too embarrassed and low to say I needed more sanitary products. Then I was kicked out of my bed in the morning because I was “medically fine” and had to go wait on a chair the whole morning until the crisis team bothered to show up. I only had charge on my phone to ring a friend to pick me up because someone on the ward was kind enough to lend me a charger.

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