The GP, Mental Health & You.
It’s no secret that I get ill a lot. I’m not particularly healthy. Recently, my body has been extremely fond of getting chest infections. My solution was to go to the Doctors’ office and request some antibiotics.
The following happened.
Now, generally when I go to the Doctors they check through my history to see if there is any ongoing illness or anything they need to discuss such as test results. I assume this is a thing that happens to most people.
What I don’t think happens, is that the GP you are visiting with asks inappropriate, insensitive and hurtful questions.
What I wanted to say was the following passive aggressiveness.
But it occurred to me that maybe this person needs to be shown how ridiculous they are behaving. So I actually said:
Well. As you know, Depression can be caused by all manner of things. Be it biological, environmental or a likely mixture of both, there is no simple explanation for the onset of mental illness. I am still suffering from Depression and I likely will do for the rest of my life. But thank you for your question and I am indeed doing better than I was when first diagnosed several years ago.
She prescribed me the antibiotics I needed and I’m sure you’ll be very pleased to know that my chest infection cleared up. Yay.
The reason I’m telling this story is that in reality, most Doctors aren’t like this. This is the first experience I’ve ever had with anyone in the medical profession dealing with my mental health, that I have felt uncomfortable and uneasy. In the past eight years since my diagnosis of Depression I have received nothing but help, consideration and care.
Unfortunately; having spoken to a wide variety of people over the years about mental illness, comments like the following have arisen.
I don’t want to go to the Doctors’, they’ll shove some pills down my throat and that’ll be it.
They’re just a GP, they don’t know what they’re doing.
The thing is; Doctors’ can’t force you to do anything. Doctors’ are qualified professionals whose job is to provide you with the care you need. A doctor will advise you on the paths you can take, but it is up to you how you proceed.
A regular run-of-the-mill GP is not necessarily going to be able to treat you. But they know who can. They can recommend a wide range of medications if you think that’s best for you. They can recommend a whole host of people qualified to treat mental health issues; Counsellors, Cognitive Behavioural Therapists, Psychotherapists, Group therapists and more.
Admitting to yourself that you may have a mental illness is one of the hardest things to do. I was worried others would find out. I was worried people would look at me differently as if I had a big “HAHA I’M CRAZY!” bubble over my head. Now I’m very happy to talk about my illness as I know I’m not the only person suffering. 1 in 4 people in the United Kingdom alone will experience some kind of mental health problem. With the most common being Depression and/or Anxiety.
But; it’s not that easy to tell a Doctor, is it? If it was, I may not be writing this post. If it was, I wouldn’t regularly see comments from people saying that they’re too scared to tell someone or they don’t think they’ll be taken seriously.
Today I came across what looks like to be a fantastic resource to help you talk to a GP about what you’re experiencing. DocReady aims to help you to plan what you want to say to a Doctor, inform you of what to expect when visiting a Doctor about mental health and helps you keep a record of what happens at your visits.
One of the groups behind DocReady is “Enabled by Design”, headed by Denise Stephens who I had the pleasure of meeting at the beginning of the year. Denise is passionate about enabling all manner of people. I have no doubt that DocReady is an important and useful tool.
DocReady says the following about the role of a GP.
GPs aren’t usually specialists in particular bits of medicine. They give advice, prescribe medicines and treatments and can refer you on to more specialist care. It’s their job to try to get you the help you need to be as well as you can be.
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GPs don’t just give prescriptions for medicines. They can also give advice, help you to find other sources of help and also refer you to other medical professionals with more specialist knowledge.
I don’t expect everyone to read this post and go “Oh wow. Okay, I’ll go right to my GP and get this shit sorted.”. What I do hope is that if you were previously against the idea of visiting a GP, you might start to think differently. There is help out there.
