a 27-year-old multimedia producer in London, confided to a friend that he was feeling suicidal. His friend rang the police, who detained Paul under the Mental Health Act for his own safety. It was then that a psychiatrist gave him a diagnosis that, for the first time, seemed to make sense of the emotional difficulties Paul had grappled with since he was a teenager: borderline personality disorder.
In the past few weeks, as Britain enforced strict social distancing measures and the NHS urgently reprioritised resources to fight the spread of COVID-19, mental health services across the country have been severely disrupted, forcing many vulnerable people into a deeply unsettling situation. Face-to-face contact for the vast majority of people has been suddenly halted and many of the services they used are now suspended.
Mental health providers are rushing to put in place temporary measures, but the sector had a slow start. It was only in mid-March, when the virus had already taken hold in the country, that NHS Englandinstructing them to urgently start contingency planning. Talk therapies, group workshops, and other outpatient services that are deemed non-essential have been scaled back or put on hold to enforce social distancing and so that staff can be redeployed to critical areas. In hospitals, psychiatric inpatients have been barred from having visitors.
Heyes told BuzzFeed News: “We recognise that certain changes might be necessary to enable the health system to operate with extreme staff shortages and increased demand, but this cannot be at the expense of providing critical support to people with mental health problems.” Edward, a 32-year-old adviser to a wealthy family, who lives in London, said had been making good progress since he began seeing a therapist last summer but had found the abrupt transition to remote treatment disconcerting.
“I’m trying to focus on the things I can actually control, but in the face of radical uncertainty it can be quite difficult to know what one can actually control in the short- and medium-term and what one can’t. I tend to lose focus quite easily at the moment, which leads to a lack of industriousness and pinwheeling around in neurosis.”
They’re monitoring people as much as they can by telephone and aiming to see people within five days if they’re classified as in urgent need, the nurse said. But many people who need assessments will have to wait until after the outbreak.
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