Carly's Story
This individual’s story contains themes of self-harm and suicide, which may be distressing for some readers. Reader Discretion is advised.
“I’m twenty, and I’ve been in the mental health system since I was thirteen. It’s never been the best, but across the last few years I have noticed a disturbing decline in the system. With the growing rates of mental illness, there’s simply not enough resources to keep up with demand in the community or the inpatient mental health sector alike.
At the beginning of 2023, Just before my eighteenth birthday, I was at high risk of self-harm and suicide. I was already inpatient in a PECC unit (emergency short stay psychiatric facility) at the time, but I required 1:1 care due to my high-risk. Unfortunately, the facility didn’t have enough nursing staff available to provide that level of individualised support, so instead, I was transferred into a High Dependency Unit. I stayed at the HDU twice.
This transfer was necessary to ensure my immediate safety, but it definitely did not provide a person-centred, or trauma-informed approach to care. I remember wanting more therapeutic support, or even just something to do, but the only thing available was a TV you couldn’t hear out of, and Valium.
Through my experience, the staff there couldn’t identify or respond to my needs as an autistic person. Once, during an autistic shutdown, I lost my ability to verbally communicate. I was trying to self regulate by hitting myself— something commonly seen in autistic people when experiencing a state of overwhelm.
In response, I was forced into another room and made to take off my clothes with zero privacy. Once I was in anti-ligature gown, I was told if I “kept the behaviour up” I would have my glasses and underwear taken from me, too. The measure felt punitive instead of therapeutic, and I don’t believe it would have happened if the nursing staff involved in my care had adequate training on neurodiversity, or providing trauma-informed care.
At one stage, I was one of the only female patients in my section of the ward. The rest were men twice my age, and one of them were transferred in from jail. Despite raising concerns about this, one night, a man managed to enter my room and he urinated on me as I slept. Despite this, I was still kept in the same ward with this other patient… Once again, this likely wouldn’t have happened if mental health patients had access to individualised care, and if the staff delivering it weren’t so burnt out and exhausted all the time.
My breaking point was at the end of last year. My depression and PTSD began to rapidly worsen, and I began experiencing symptoms that were new for me, even after having these illnesses for a long time. At the time, I was receiving one hour a week of therapy, but it was becoming clear that I needed more support.
For months, I begged for more help in the public mental health system. I felt so scared because I felt myself deteriorating so quickly, and I truly wanted the help, but there was simply no resources beyond the same baseline treatment offered to me at thirteen.
By December of last year, I wanted to die, not because I wanted my life to end, but because I couldn’t see a way out of the extreme pain I was experiencing. I had no hope, and not because of my illnesses, but because our government placed it behind ever-thickening paywalls. In the end, I was only able to get more support after becoming so unwell I had harmed myself to the extent of being sectioned and hospitalised. I have since learned that this extremely reactive approach to care is very common for people suffering from mental illness.
After a week in a PECC ward, I was sent back home under the same care plan that had evidently not been working, while still vocalising an active plan to end my life. An hour later, I was sectioned again while trying to go through with this plan (….who would have thought?), and was re-hospitalised. This time, my friend and I exhausted all of the pre-existing measures (e.g the REACH call), to advocate for more support. Despite this, I was sent home yet again, not even twelve hours following. At that point, it was clear to me that for the intervention point for people with complex needs is the morgue, and it’s disgusting.
Somehow, nearly six months has passed since then, and I have seemingly clawed my way through that period of crisis. I say this with immense hesitancy, though, as it became far too close to it all ending differently, and I can’t imagine how many others have been placed in a similar situation, but couldn’t keep fighting, to no fault of their own. I am still living, not because the mental health system fostered true healing, but out of hope that one day I can make it a place that finally will. Life is still very challenging, but at this point, I’m simply too mad at the system and all of its damage to stop fighting.”
