For those dependent on support from mental health services, life can sometimes feel like a negative version of the calendar of other people's lives. Weekends, for example, provide for many a break from the world of work, a chance to relax, catch up on sleep and spend time with friends and family.
But many service users dread weekends, especially when things are difficult.
Weekends and other holidays are by their very nature times when regular sources of support are not available. Time off for workers inevitably means time spent away from clients. And although crisis services are generally available to provide for emergencies, for a great many mental health service users weekends are something to be got through and Monday morning comes with a sigh of relief.
Christmas, as well as being a long weekend (four days long this year, in fact four days long for the next four years, I have just, with some horror, worked out) presents a cocktail of additional stresses. Few who have imbibed it can wonder at the fact that as well as being the season of peace and good will, Christmas is also peak suicide time, and a good sleigh length ahead of the rest when it comes to psychiatric admissions.
I have myself spent a number of Christmases as a patient on the wards and somewhat surreal as they may have been – not only on account of the medication – they were undoubtedly a whole lot better than two more I struggled through, acutely depressed, on my own.
Loneliness is a massive problem for many mental health service users living in the community. In addition to day centres being closed, the omnipresent decorations, the drunk office workers in party hats, the kids trying out presents in the park, the seasonal programmes from Albert Square to Ho! Ho! Holby City and the sense of all-pervading good cheer, can make a lonely Christmas feel very lonely indeed.
Christmas on the wards is at least in some sense communal. Generally speaking an effort is made on the part of staff lured from their own festive hearths by the prospect of overtime. There are decorations, usually paper-chains, handmade by a young, enthusiastic and normally Antipodean, occupational therapist, who persists in trying to get patients away from the TV to come and help her, whilst cheerily sticking a thousand links together single-handed. There is a Christmas dinner of processed turkey, damp roast potatoes and, oddly, carrots, washed down with a choice of orange or blackcurrant squash. There are presents, or rather a present per patient, courtesy of the NHS and guaranteed incapable of being used to inflict self harm.
At the same time the regular pulse of the ward continues to beat through it all – mealtimes and medication, escorted fag breaks every two hours, changes of staff shift, handover. It makes for an odd sort of combination, queuing up for meds in paper crowns, sad but somehow strangely touching too.
