People with mental health problems who use NHS services describe being treated with disrespect, or as a nuisance, both when presenting in an emergency and during more routine intervention and they describe how their symptoms can be down played or even ignored by NHS staff.
Here, writer and mental health campaigner Lisa Rodrigues shares her own personal mental health story and tells us why it is Time to Change, to get NHS staff to consider their own attitudes to mental illness, and to ask NHS staff who have experienced mental illness and who are willing to do so, to speak about their experiences, thus reducing the sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’.
Time to Change is one of the campaigns that NHS Change Day is supporting this year. To find out what actions you can make to support Time to Change, visit changeday.nhs.uk/campaigns/timetochange.