I am pleased to see the choice of charities for the Guardian Christmas appeal this year, as I have worked as a mental health nurse for more than 30 years. Beyond the Cuckoo’s Nest is a project in Rotherham that has been active for over 20 years. The main aim is to challenge stigma by giving a voice to people with lived experience of mental health conditions, especially psychosis. This often involves presentations in schools and colleges.
Your article on young carers (Haven for isolated young carers of parents with mental illness, 13 December) brought to mind an experience we had in a local secondary school. Year 11 students listened to experiences of mental health difficulties and recovery. As we were leaving one explained that she was a young carer for her mother, who had been diagnosed with a psychosis seven years earlier. She had never disclosed this at school because of fear the stigma would lead to her being bullied. Having heard people describe their experience, she now felt able to talk about her own experience. A teacher pointed out that a support plan could now be developed for the girl.
I believe that the stigma associated with mental health problems is as great a challenge as the “condition” the person experiences. Having been a young carer myself (not something recognised in the 1960s), highlighting the needs of young carers as you have done is to the good.
Nick Arkle
Sheffield
• Like Gael Mosesson (Letters, 13 December) I owe heartfelt thanks to the NHS staff who are looking after me through cancer treatment. Everyone tells me how well I am coping; maybe that’s because chemotherapy, while not much fun, is easy compared with the distress of a first-time episode of severe depression, which two years ago put me in a psychiatric hospital for five weeks.
While there I met people in circumstances much more difficult than mine ( I am retired, financially secure, with supportive family and friends), who were kind and funny and helped each other and me through. I owe the wonderful NHS a lot, but mental health services are, in spite of the promises, still appallingly underfunded and overstretched. The work of the charities you are supporting fills a huge gap, so please, Guardian readers, double the number you first thought of and give it now.
Vanessa Reburn
Devizes, Wiltshire
• I have a different perspective on the use of psychotropic medication from your correspondent Naomi Wallace (Letters, 15 December) as a result of 30 years’ working in research in the pharmaceutical industry and subsequently nine years adjudicating on the compulsory detention of patients under the Mental Health Act. Psychotic patients have a mental disorder and need to be offered treatment in the same way patients with physical illnesses are offered help to control their symptoms. It is morally wrong to deny mentally ill patients treatment and to resist the efforts of well-meaning research scientists trying to understand the origins of the disease and subsequently sell the results of their endeavours as useful treatments.
If medications for mental health issues do not work they fall out of use and are replaced by better, safer medications. It is offensive to suggest that Big Pharma is bent on “assuring us we are very sick and in need of constant drugging” when so many lives have been saved and enhanced by psychotropic medications.
Professor Derek Middlemiss
Newark, Nottinghamshire
• Guidelines from Nice to support and treat pregnant women and new parents with mental illness are welcome (Report, 17 December), but we are concerned they will not be implemented given the huge gaps in perinatal mental health services across the country.
A recent inquiry showed a total of 111 mothers had died from psychiatric causes between 2010 and 2011, a distressing confirmation of the fact that mental illness can be terminal if not treated.
We call on the government to increase funds for specialist services, such as mother and baby units, as well as community-based services and to ensure there is adequate training for all health practitioners in touch with new parents. All those who need perinatal mental health services throughout the UK must have access to them.
Susie Parsons
Chief executive, National Childbirth Trust
