And then she was discharged from the general hospital and she was by then, taken into care by CAMHS.

Our local CAMHS and they saw her every couple of days. So she had somebody working with her and I had somebody working with me, which was brilliant [sighs]. Sorry, it goes on and on. What happened, she went back to school, which I thought was amazing.

They were trying to take her life back to normal, while seeing her very regularly and she was under the care of a psychologist as well. Yeah, they came to see her when she was in hospital and they agreed on a plan. So I felt very held by these professionals.

Very looked after.

The CAMHS [Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service] team were very nice that came out and spoke to us. Then the psychiatrist from the unit came out and interviewed her and he was very good. She didn’t take to him straight away but I did. I thought he was ideal and, and the staff at the unit have been absolutely fantastic, absolutely fantastic because shes had some foul moods. Shes had some really foul swings but they, they’re a brilliant team. They really are a brilliant team and she is very supported, regardless of what she says, depending on what mood shes in, she does get an awful lot of support there. They are very good and they make me feel very, very supported. So we have the parent forum every week, where we can just sit back and have a coffee and a natter or ask something but the team is always there. I can phone any time to talk to any of them and they phone with regular updates or concerns or, or good news. So yeah, they’re, they’re really, really good.

So she carried on self-harming. Things didn’t get any better. Things got progressively worse. Her behaviour got worse. She started indulging in behaviours, I’m not sure, I think if you look at self-harm as a broader topic, you probably would consider them to be self-harm, although at the time I never did, but part of her, she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder just short of her eighteenth birthday. They’re very reluctant to diagnose mental, to give mental health diagnoses prior to eighteen, particularly BPD but I think, but she shed researched it when she was about fourteen or fifteen and decided that that was probably what was wrong with her and she found it very unhelpful that CAMHS [Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service], that the person she was seeing at CAMHS, because we had family counselling at CAMHS and she had individual counselling at CAMHS, she found it very unhelpful that the person she saw individually at CAMHS wouldn’t engage with her in a discussion that this was a possible diagnosis. It’s one of the things, when weve talked about the things that made life difficult for her when she was a teen, is the fact that the person involved wouldn’t even have a conversation going, I can understand why you feel like that, [daughter’s name], we can certainly talk about it but you must understand, we don’t diagnose until eighteen. She would have been quite happy with that.

But instead, what she felt she got was a, I’m not discussing it period. And I think that what that did was it prevented her from engaging fully with CAMHS and I think, as a result of that, the destructive behaviours that we witnessed might, in some ways, have been more extreme because I think she felt she had a point to make by then.

When she first was seen by PCAMHS [Primary care Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service], she was referred to them by the GP. There was a little delay. I remember being incredibly anxious during the time when I knew she was cutting herself and before she was seeing anyone. It was it was a time for me when it was it was a very anxious time because we weren’t talking about anything.

We weren’t talking about her behaviour at all but I knew that she was doing it and she was seen by PCAMHS. They have an assessment session and then six sessions and she, during the time that she was being seen by PCAMHS, she cut herself, to our knowledge, two or three times but then in the last three the last three weeks, therefore, the last three sessions, she didn’t cut herself at all. So when it came to time for her review from PCAMHS they said, you know, We think this behaviour has stopped. Weve managed to talk about it and stop this behaviour. And I felt very unhappy about it because I knew that [my daughter] was still very unhappy. I keep saying that.

Yes, say, My daughter.

Yeah, I knew she was very unhappy and I felt that all that had, it was a sticking plaster on on what was going on. It was it was not.

The root of the problem had not come out. But they seemed happy and they said, If you have any more problems go back to your GP.

So we then found ourselves in a position where we were, telling [our daughter] she had to do what CAMHS were telling us, you know, we have no choice, and this is just going to sound. I mean it sounds ludicrous to me now that we, we went along with any of this but we did. And so we were told we had to take that route. We had this first meeting, very well meaning, you know, nice lady but just completely ineffectual and we came away from it thinking, Well, weve come, we, weve got to persist with this because it’s, obviously, going to be a slowly, slowly approach and it’s going to take time. Were not going to get a magic wand out, and it’s all going to suddenly be better, so weve just got to go along with it. Daughter of course, came out of it thinking, Well, that was no help whatsoever. I felt patronised. Bear in mind, she actually wasn’t talking to us at all at the moment, at this sort of particular stage, but, we can see now, that this was how she was feeling. All the questioning, well, there were two kinds of questions, in that first meeting. The first style of questioning was, How do you feel about what’s happened? Okay, now, when, one of the first things this doctor said to my husband, when he talked about it was, It is pointless asking how somebody feels. Because they don’t know how they feel, and they don’t know why things have happened, how they got here, there is no point, because all you’re doing is telling them how useless they are, and you’re putting them under more pressure.

So, the first line of questioning was completely stupid, as it turned out, and, so all of the questions were, you know, What did you do? What’s happened to you? How, where have you, why have you got to this stage? You know, tell us how you feel about your grandparents? Tell how you feel about various things that have happened to you over the summer, and how do you feel about the self-harming? And, of course, all that do, was doing was making it worse, because she was sitting there thinking she was being bombarded and interrogated by all these questions, of which she had absolutely no way of answering.

I ended up answering most of the questions in this particular thing, and I mean I, I just found myself saying all the things as, as an adult, you learn to deal with situations and you go into game-play mode. So, you know what the social situation requires of you, and so you do what is required of you, and that’s what we did. We sat there and we answered the questions. We tried to get at what we thought our daughter might have been feeling, and so, of course, shes sitting there thinking, Oh okay, so that’s how they’d worked that out. And so you’ve then got to go outside and say, Look I’ve got absolutely no idea, but weve to play the game. Weve got to.

So, shes not saying anything at all to this doctor, because the questioning is just so ludicrous, and then the second line of questioning, was, was just, check-list and, when I came away and told my husband about it, he just said, They’re just covering their backs. It was classic, back covering, questioning. So it was, Are you still self-harming? And, all I could say was, Yes, I think so. Do you still have thoughts about taking, ending your life? As bluntly as that, to a child, who’s just come out of hospital and is in that sort of state.

Do you still think that you might kill yourself? And just a succession of these sorts of questions, and it was, it was tick-box stuff. So daughter, obviously, to the question, Are you still thinking of killing yourself? Sits there and shakes her head, so the box gets ticked, and they say, Well, that’s fine. I can let you back out into the community, because you’re not an immediate risk to yourself.

And it was just so pointless, and, and then a list of small print stuff, You do understand, don’t you, that we are only here during office hours. So, if you if you need any help were here between nine and five. I don’t work on Fridays so it’s nine to five Monday to Tuesday. I can be contacted by e-mail but, obviously, I’m a very busy person, so don’t expect me to reply straight away. Can’t always be accessed by phone. If you do need any help outside those hours, go to A and E.

But then the magic words, the crisis team, were said. I didn’t know what the crisis team was. She didn’t. She was very angry. She was so angry at the psychiatrist. You know, she was swearing at the psychiatrist and saying, you know, So you’re not going to help me. Well, you know, and [sighs] but he said, We want the crisis team to come and see you.

And so we were we were sent home and so I was sent home with this incredibly distraught young woman, who still five years on wasn’t sleeping, who would about twice a year have terrible episodes of depression and in between would self-harm and you’re sent home and you’re thinking, So here we are and is life ever going to get, be normal? Is this going to be how it always is? And the next day, the first psychiatric nurse came from the crisis team and I can hand on heart say, that team turned our lives around. They visited my daughter every day for a month but also what they were able to do, they were, it was it was all so joined up, and I know my daughter was really, really worried that she was going to see, yes, she was going to see different CPNs every day but their ability to feed back to each other was amazing. They were incredible people. They would come at whatever time was suitable to us. They would come in the morning. They would come in the evening. Sometimes, they came twice a day and they were able to talk to her about her medication because again, here we have someone who’s on medication but they’re still getting ill. I know people on medication get ill but it’s kind of like you start questioning it.

And she was able to see people at the hospital. She was able to be supported. I was supported. For the first time probably ever someone said, And how are you doing? And you sort of think, Please don’t ask me that because I’m going to cry and, actually, I’m doing crap and I, I’m doing really badly but I haven’t got time for that because I’ve got to care and love and look after and keep my daughter alive. And her medication was changed and suddenly, she was put on a medication that enabled her to sleep for the first time probably in about six or seven years. She was put on an anti-depressant that also has a sedative affect.

Can you talk a bit about the crisis team?

Yeah, They, the crisis team, her, [my daughter’s], her CPN came on Thursday. [My daughter] requested her to come. She normally comes once a fortnight. She came last week because she was pretty distressed and, while she was here, she said, I will refer you to the crisis team. The crisis team are there, they put in place, I don’t know if they exist in the rest of the country, but they’re put in place here to stop you being admitted to hospital. They’re a barrier because they don’t want you to go to hospital. It’s not and it, it isn’t the right thing. There have been many times when I’ve felt that it would be the right thing but that might be selfish reasons on my part actually. So they come they come to the house every evening if you need them. So they’ll phone you each day and they’ll ask you if you need them to come and if, if they thought you needed admitting, they would admit you. If they thought you were at risk or at risk of hurting somebody else they would, you know, put things in place. They have they have, you then have access to them. You can phone them if you’re in distress and theres no nowhere else for you to go.

So they have also arranged psychiatric assessment with the consultant for Thursday, so [my daughter] has got a feedback for a different assessment on Wednesday but they’ve made this appointment, and it’s not with her psychiatrist. It’s with the, the consultant, who works with them. So I don’t really know what that’s about but they can also administer drugs so they can prescribe you or bring with them diazepam, temazepam, which is what they’ve done with her to help her calm and help her sleep. So yeah, that’s basically what they do.

Since we came back from France, we managed to get out of the grip of the crisis centre. I can see their role seemed to be to do anything to keep this boy calm. They had no obvious consideration about getting him back to school or the bigger picture or treatment for that matter. It was purely a sort of, Were on the end of a telephone. Well come and see you. How are things? You know, Come on, [son], cheer up. Just taking an interest and so on. I mean that seemed to be, what to us, that seemed to be what the crisis people were concerned about. Subsequently, he was discharged by them when we left for three or four weeks holiday overseas because, obviously, they can have no role, and since coming back things have settled into a much better routine.