Some History

I am writing to you as I wish to draw your attention to how my wife is being thoroughly let down by the very services who are supposed to be helping and supporting her most.

She suffers from post natal issues and severe depression. The NHS quickly tried to pigeon hole her by trying to make the facts and symptoms twist to fit a diagnosis and once they gave that diagnosis there was no getting away from it and she was from then on treated as a statistic rather than a human being.

On the 5th of May of this year, a few days after her release from her 1^st hospital stay, I applied to the Department of Work and Pensions on her behalf to put in a claim for disability living allowance based on her known medical condition. This condition should in theory entitle her to some mobility allowance and most probably the higher rate of disability living allowance as she is incapable of going anywhere alone and on bad days needs 24 hour supervision to keep her safe from herself.  I have been signed off work for the best part of the past four months caring for her and I have now had to give up my job in order to care for her and our son who is now nearly 11 months old.

My wife has been under numerous consultants, doctors, crisis teams and mental health teams but has been discharged from them all now because, through sheer determination on her part and a massive amount of medication, she has together with the supervision and support that I give her, in the past two months, managed not to self harm any more, nor to hear voices or have suicidal attempts. These are achievements which should be celebrated as everyday is hard work for her. However in recognition of her achievement the DWP has seen fit to finally write back on the 10th of August after delays and prevarication and report that her claim was unsuccessful and that she does not need help with her daily living.

It has always been difficult to make my wife take her medication as it makes her feel like a zombie and she describes it as watching the world happen all around her whilst feeling like she is thinking through treacle. As a result of the DWP decision she is now refusing to take her medication because she has taken the view that because she is not, according to the NHS, visibly suffering, the DWP will not recognise her as having mental health problems. She has to ask why should she try so hard if all it means is that her family is going to be worse off because in spite of whatever it is they believe I can honestly say she cannot cope on her own especially not when being alone also involves looking after her son of 11 months who although lovely can, like all 11 month olds, be very demanding.

According to the letter we received from the DWP we are entitled to appeal the DWP's decision but when we called in order to do so we were met with open hostility, implying that we were making it all up, that we were making a fraudulent claim and to simply go away. However I persisted with the request to appeal and read the list of mistakes from their report. There was not a single thing correct in their assessment. We were then informed that it would take a minimum of 11 weeks for them to consider the appeal and that if this was then still unsuccessful it would be a another 12 weeks till we could go to a tribunals board. When asked was there no way to speed things up we were told that this was standard procedure as although it is an appeal it is treated as a new claim and therefore has to go back into the queue for yet another assessor.

Quite how the assessor can believe that we could make a story up about two weeks in one NHS mental health ward, another week in another NHS mental health ward and two weeks in a private mental health hospital, with myself being signed off work for almost four months to care for her is beyond me. This is especially the case as if they bothered to contact any of these institutions and requested information from them they would obtain appropriate information. They did not, as far as I am aware, contact any of them.

The NHS labelled my wife with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder soon after first seeing her and stuck with it, seemingly unwilling to change their mind on it and basing their treatment upon it.  Phrases such as 'this treatment works well for people with borderline personality disorder' and 'hospitalisation is not appropriate for borderline personality disorder ‘were constantly bandied about. We wanted, indeed needed, to get a second opinion, as my wife’s self harming and suicide attempts were getting more and more serious and we knew that her next suicide attempt would probably be successful. The NHS, because of the label they had given her, refused to help her. When we asked for a second opinion we were informed this was not available on the NHS and that they were convinced their diagnosis was accurate so they would not refer her for a second opinion anyway. So we borrowed some money which we could not afford and went to see a private consultant at a private hospital.

After a meeting the consultant was convinced my wife did not show any signs of borderline personality disorder but suffered from serious depression with pseudo auditory hallucinations. The consultant/specialist felt it would be essential to take her into the hospital's care immediately. Thanks to funding from her father of in excess of £10000, she went in for just over two weeks to the hospital where she responded very well to the therapies and treatments but had to be discharged back to NHS care due to being unable to fund any longer there. The NHS recited their previous belief that people with borderline personalities do not react well to hospitalisation and therefore they refused to fund any further treatment.

Despite the consultant’s report from the private hospital stating that my wife does not have a borderline personality, the NHS were still convinced borderline  personality disorder was the correct diagnosis. Their comment upon reading the consultant’s report was ‘that’s nice, but we think she has something else’! What, I have to ask, has happened to the NHS treating each patient as an individual and caring for them on a case by case basis rather than treating people as a statistic?

If it is the case that my wife does have a borderline personality then surely even that is further proof that I need to be home all the time caring for her and therefore she should be entitled to the disability living allowance. It seems to us that the system wants it both ways; they want to give her a life restricting diagnosis while at the same time denying anything is wrong with her.

As you can imagine the situation is causing substantial strain on the family; the inflexibility of the DWP and the off-handedness’ of the NHS are almost beyond belief in this present day and age. What happened to the "Caring Society"?