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Posted 1 month ago

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AND WHILE I AM RANTING

Danielle - Yes!  You know, since I moved here, my anxiety levels got to be really outrageous and eventually turned into a full blown panic disorder, and I can tell you that I found the options for mental health treatment on the NHS to be somewhat lacking.  The doctors in my practice were more than happy to throw pills at me, but to get any actual counseling it took SEVERAL very firm requests and even a change to a better doctor.  You can imagine, too, that in my condition, making firm requests of anyone was nearly impossible, so the entire process took much, much longer than it should have. 

The counseling offered was an 8 week course of cognitive behavioural therapy, which I found to be entirely useless as it only treated symptoms (what to do if you have a panic attack) and not causes (why are you having one anyway?)  When it became clear that this was all I was going to get, we bit the bullet and now I pay about £140 a month (that we really don’t have - it comes out of our savings) to see a private counselor for person-centric talk therapy.  (Which, thankfully, has been MASSIVELY helpful and I am getting my life back.)  

I have mentioned to my GP several times about the counseling and he’s said that the NHS only usually would pay for this kind of talk therapy when a person has been under depression treatment for several years.  I’ve been on anti-depressants now for nearly two years, and in counseling for the better part of a year.  What I’ve found now is that the NHS knows I’m paying it out of pocket and therefore they see no reason to pay for it themselves.  It’s kind of appalling.  I try only to think about how much better I feel, and also that if I still lived in the states, I wouldn’t have gotten help at all, having been uninsured.  It’s still no excuse for the way the system works, though.

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  1. sistacrumpet said: I don’t even bother telling the doctor because nothing gets done. If I have to ASK the doctor to take my stats (weight, blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature) do I believe they know what to do when I ask for a counselor? Hell no. Sob.
  2. inteawetrust posted this

 

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