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'Mental health was a crisis in Caithness long before Covid'


By Alan Hendry

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Luke Graham at Wick's Braehead with the harbour in the background. Picture: Alan Hendry
Luke Graham at Wick's Braehead with the harbour in the background. Picture: Alan Hendry

Luke Graham hit "rock bottom" on an autumn night 2015. On medication for depression, and drinking heavily, he tried to end his life. Since then he has talked openly about his own experiences of mental illness, and "the system", to argue for better services for those who are struggling.

While mental health issues have been brought into sharp focus by Covid-19, Luke insists there has been a crisis for years – and warns that it will continue long after the pandemic unless there is a greater commitment to local provision.

“A lot of what I am seeing at the minute is being talked about through the prism of Covid," he said. "What I would like to get across is that these issues are not new – they are long-term. If we’d had these things [better services] in place before the pandemic then things might have been a lot easier on us."

Luke (29), from Wick, was a member of a Highland youth health panel, served as a community councillor for two years, stood for election to Highland Council in 2017 and attended NHS stakeholder meetings, all the time "banging the drum" over mental health, but has seen little or no progress. “Of course it is always a question of money and resources," he said. "But that is the question that needs to be answered.”

It is for this reason that Luke, who has been a Liberal Democrat member for over a decade, is supporting a campaign and petition launched by the party's Holyrood candidate for Caithness, Sutherland and Ross, Molly Nolan. She says people are facing unacceptable waiting times and a lack of appropriate local care, and her petition calls for mental health service investment in the constituency.

Luke's message to the Scottish Government would be that “the health service is part of your duties". He said: "They have not stepped up. We have not got the solutions that we’ve needed.”

He sees a need for "more money, more provision, more facilities, having the professional help there in a reasonable timescale to actually react".

In the media, Luke has noticed the mental health debate becoming "tied quite explicitly" to the pandemic. "One of the reasons I wanted to speak up was that it’s really not as simple as that," he said.

“These are problems that I recognise from four or five years ago – a lot of the issues are the same. If we look at it through the pandemic, once we get out of it on the other side, whatever ‘normal’ is after this, it could be quite worrying to think that we’ll just go back to the status quo then.”

His own crisis with mental illness began to emerge while he was working in a shop and a workmate observed there was something wrong.

“You hit a patch… I kind of deteriorated mental health-wise quite rapidly," Luke explained. "You don’t think about it. You don’t go, ‘Oh well, I need to go and see somebody about this.’ I was just trying to get on with life.

"Somebody at my work turned round to me and went, ‘Why don’t you go to see your GP? You’re not the same person that walked through the door when you started working here.’

“So I did. I was diagnosed by my GP with depression. I was put on a pretty low dose of medication and I got on with things. But things got steadily worse. I got signed off from work eventually and the dosage of medication went up.

“To be quite honest I was drinking quite heavily as well, which is not a great combination. You get into a hole. One night I was drinking incredibly heavily and decided that the best thing to do would be to throw myself into the harbour.

“Fortunately there was a friend there with me who was able to fish me out and got in contact with my parents. My dad came and picked me up, took me home, just looked after me for the night, and then I went in to see the GP the next day and got signed off from work a bit longer.

"I think there was a referral put in to get therapy, to get help. His advice was that, if I ever felt that I was going to do something like that again, to walk into A&E and they would look after me.

“For the position I got myself into, if I hadn’t been surrounded by friends and family who were willing to help, I’d have been stuck because that’s as much help as I got from the professional side of things four or five years ago.

“I think back now and, to be as blunt as I can be, I tried to kill myself and the only person I ever spoke to in a professional context was my GP. Nobody else.

“There are always people worse off than yourself, but I feel like I hit rock bottom five years ago and I am lucky to have a strong social network."

The harbour ordeal "could have been a lot worse" had it not been for the quick actions of his friend. “I was lucky to get away with just scrapes and bruises, essentially.

“I don’t remember everything because I was a bit out of it. But a police car did turn up and I think both my dad and my friend had a word with the police and they just decided that I was best left in their hands.”

That was the "extreme point", and Luke is "in a much better place" now.

“We hear quite a bit that the biggest killer of young men is suicide. I am on the right side of that door but I’ve been at that door, knocking. I look at things now and I’m hearing all the same stuff.

“We’ve known about this for so long. I’ve talked about it multiple times. I’ve put it to politicians, I sat on that youth panel, I highlighted the issues there. I’ve been on the community council where we’ve had NHS board members in the room, I’ve been at stakeholder groups. The one thing I have always spoken about is mental health.

“It’s 2021, a year through a pandemic, and I don’t see where we’ve made any progress at all from where I was. The experiences I am seeing being relayed through the local paper now are the same ones that I saw four or five years ago that I have flagged up repeatedly.

“People walk through the door already very, very late and the waiting times are long. If you see anyone at all, it’s probably in Inverness, not up here. People fall through the cracks in the meantime and you don’t get them back.

“Treatment for mental health is bespoke. There is no one-size-fits-all. Antidepressants work for me, they don’t work for everybody. People talk about social prescribing. That works for some people, it doesn’t work for everybody. Some people need to sit down and have long conversations with psychiatrists or psychologists and that’s how they work through things.

“The one thing I was given by my GP was a line for a CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy] helpline. I spoke to them twice and that didn’t work for me at all.”

He added: “None of this is criticism of any of the professionals that I did come across – but I didn’t come across very many of them at all. I don’t think that my GP failed me in any way. As I understand it, I was referred forwards but not once did I hear that I was going to see anybody.

“I went back on to medication a couple of years ago for a short stint. I’m quite good at recognising things myself. I know the difference between ‘oh, I’m having a bad day today’ and ‘this is me being ill’. I think I’m doing okay. It’s probably something I need to manage, to keep an eye on for the rest of my life, but I’m definitely in a better place now."

If you see anyone at all, it’s probably in Inverness, not up here. People fall through the cracks in the meantime and you don’t get them back.

Luke is currently on furlough from his job as receptionist at Wick's Norseman Hotel and is on the board of Caithness Voluntary Group.

“I put down my recovery to having a decent social structure around me," he said. "Three o’clock in the morning, my dad gets a phone call to say that Luke’s done a dumb thing, and he is right there. They always make sure things are not going to be spiralling anywhere.

“And it’s not just family – I have friends around me as well, and one or two of them have been through the system themselves. Without telling their stories for them, their experiences have not been good. There just seems to be a real lack of help in a professional sense.

“There is a difference between mental health and mental illness. Everybody has got their mental health. It might be good mental health, it might be bad mental health. Most people are somewhere in between those two. That is true of everybody.

“Mental illness then is actually being ill. All the solutions that we are talking about are to do with that, and that has been a problem far longer than there has been a pandemic on.

“The pandemic has caused us all to make adjustments, and to my mind those have been necessary adjustments. I just feel that if the infrastructure had been in place before the pandemic hit then the narrative that we have now might be very different.

“I was sitting in meetings years ago where NHS directors were calling it the ‘ticking time bomb’. It’s not like we didn’t know, and the people responsible for looking after us from a health perspective were not unaware that this was a problem.

“You never know what the future brings but I’ve felt that I am quite good at managing it and I have learned from it and I just have to accept that this is something I need to be aware of so that I’m not putting myself in those situations again.

“It’s quite important to talk about it and raise awareness because not everybody can do it or wants to do it. I have always been quite candid and open about it.

“Like I say, I was quite fortunate. There have certainly been people worse off than me and I can completely understand why they would not want to walk back over those experiences. They’re not pleasant – it’s not pleasant for me. But it is important, I feel, that awareness is raised and if nothing else we go some way towards breaking the social taboo of talking about it and the social stigma of recognising when people are struggling.

“They’re not somehow soft, they’re not a failure in and of themselves. They’re just ill.”

  • There is a range of support services, including some based in the Highlands, for people having suicidal thoughts, while NHS Inform, Scotland's national health information service, has a web page with contact information at www.nhsinform.scot/campaigns/suicide


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