DIARIES FROM DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

There have been so many times I’ve heard in the popular media about the issues pertaining to mental health and the great lengths governments have been going to in the way of tackling it. In my experience what I’ve found is anything but and is similar to the issue I found with DV Connect and other services provided for domestic violence assistance.

On the surface and if you are fortunate to be a person that is not in a position to be needing one of these it would appear that things are being taken seriously and plans were in place to tackle these issues.

Unfortunately once again I find that is anything but the case!

I would even say that as we learn more about certain issues the worse off the help is getting when tackling them. So where does blame lay and really why is this the case?

Let me start by pointing out just like our country used to provide ‘free university’ which a lot of our more experienced politicians would have had the pleasure of enjoying, sadly our health system is no longer ‘free’. Has the great Medicare refund scheme distracted us from the fact this is going on right before our very eyes? Is it really just me who can see this because I’ve been ranting about it for a while or are people simply too busy or uninterested to notice? Possibly it’s because we just don’t care because we don’t have a use for it in out lives at the time!

Don’t get me wrong there are still public hospitals but has anyone stopped to ask the question if having to now pay for part of a once bulkbilled almost everywhere GP service that maybe one day public hospitals won’t be so bulkbilled as well? I mean it’s less of a shock this way than going from ‘everything bulkbilled’ to having to pay the entire cost of your healthcare much like the United States.

My question is if we are now paying partially for it then where is the money we save going?

I have now had 3 hospitals fail me completely and in the Brisbane when it comes to mental issues. Without boring you with the details let’s just say the first one not only turned me away before a suicide attempt, which they were extremely sorry for but the help offered post attempt resulted in me telling the training psychiatrist that he would be responsible for patient deaths in the future due to his approach and he should consider a change to his career. The second lost money and my iPad along with a list of other issues and thirdly this week while I was aware that the wait was long, I simply gave up on waiting after firstly being offered a phone number instead of help but 10.5 hours waiting to speak to someone just left me disheartened.

So where the hell do you go if you feel like everything is getting too much? I have a psychiatrist I have been seeing for over 2 years now but he seems to almost ignore me or suggest more medications to help the problem? Tell me if I up my dosage will that help me find more money to live on as I currently struggle to pay for the basics thus causing me more anxiety? How about no it won’t but it may make me tired so I can sleep away some of those hours I usually spend worrying.

I called Beyond Blue a day later which appears at the top of the Google search engine. Not only was that advice blatantly obvious answers which made me question if the guy had even listened to me I ended the call feeling even worse. I did learn that although in the past there had been better serviced through out the public hospital system now it was really just a suicide watch tank and the rest expected to be done outside major hospitals.

So where do you go when life gets way too hard and you need to discuss it? Where do you go when you find you are having major issues coping and even walking out of the front door some days is almost impossible. You find it is compounding and don’t know where to turn?

I would have thought that when you had tried so many options already as I have which simply weren’t working maybe a major hospital might have some good advice.

So in the end where is all of this money in tax we are paying going if more and more we are funding our own healthcare?

Once again I find that it’s mostly smoke and mirrors and when you don’t need these services it seems as if they are on top of it and something is being done but just like DV Connect it’s a case of ‘what’s the fucking point?’.