I found this in my flat

It’s the bag my clothes, underwear, and burns dressings were put into by police after I was arrested in the emergency department six years ago. They had been stripped off me, even the dressings for my burns, while I was restrained on the floor in the cell

B35 was (I think) the cell I was in. I’m not certain because I was so unwell I didn’t understand all of what happened. The reason I was arrested was because police had taken me to the emergency dept with chemical burns from OCD, and wanted me to have a mental health assessment.

The mental health assessment team in the emergency department did not want me to have a mental health assessment. Despite NICE guidance and RCPsych guidance and all evidence pointing towards people with self harm injuries needing an assessment every time in the ED, they refused.

We’d been there at least 11 hours. The ED weren’t pleased because I had “breached”. And because I was really unwell and they didn’t want me in resus anymore and thought I needed to be at the burns unit. The burns unit were ok to admit, but only after a mental health assessment.

The mental health team however were not into this idea and despite the police, the ED, and the out of area burns unit all requesting a mental health assessment, they declined. The police decided I wasn’t safe to be on my own, so to break the impasse, they arrested me.

This was my first arrest “to prevent a breach of the peace”. I was curled up on a trolley in resus at the time, almost silent and terrified. Some months later I was arrested again in similar circumstances. I’ve written about that before here: https://twitter.com/drem_79/status/1112065024128888838?s=21 https://twitter.com/drem_79/status/1112065024128888838

I was handcuffed and put in leg restraints and carried to the police van where I was put into the cage. A nurse came running out after me, but only because I still had some monitoring equipment on my body which they wanted back. No one from the ED tried to intervene or advocate.

They stopped the van at one point on the journey from the hospital to the cells because there was new blood on the van door. Despite being in cuffs and restraints and having limited choice where I bled they shouted at me for messing up the van and carried on to the police station

If you’re wanting “the other side of the story” and how I came to be with police, I’ve written about the type of emergency here. This was about yet another incident. I’m not well. But I’m not committing offences either. I need mental health help not arrest https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-bulletin/article/when-selfharm-is-about-preventing-harm-emergency-management-of-obsessivecompulsive-disorder-and-associated-selfharm/AB29394E48CDCB659B642D71B5D69462/core-reader

At the police station there was a long queue for booking. Some time passed and I was more and more frightened. I was in a lot of pain with the burns. Suddenly I was picked up by six officers and carried face down to a cell where I was restrained prone on the floor and stripped.

They stripped off the burns dresssings that had just been applied in the emergency department too. If you’ve not seen burns dressing before there are a number of layers and a lot of bandages because deep burns leak a lot of fluid. They decided to take them all off.

They did this they later said because the burns dressings posed a risk of self harm. The risks of having significant burn injuries undressed in a dirty police cell were not assessed. I was left naked in the cell on the floor and a few minutes later an anti rip suit was thrown in.

According to the senior officer who later investigated what went wrong I spent the next 6+ hours banging my head on the metal cell door. The last thing I remember is a staff member coming in, shouting at me about the blood and calling me a: “stupid bitch”. This was later upheld.

The next day, the police still hadn’t managed to arrange a mental health assessment. Because I had been arrested “to prevent a breach of the peace” there was confusion how to set this up, and continued reluctance from the mental health team, who, shamefully, were pleased.

I know they were pleased because people actually later wrote in a letter that it would be “good for [me]” to encounter the criminal justice system. And that being processed via criminal justice rather than mental health was “preferable”. They also refused to help police, or me.

The solicitor they wrote to (and spoke to after my second arrest in similar circs) later took the unusual step of telling me to get away from the mental health team. They said they had seen a lot but rarely someone as pleased that an unwell person was being prosecuted for it.

I don’t remember much of this at the time though. By now I was concussed with a head injury. After I was de-arrested the next day I was handed the bag of clothes and cut up dressings and struggled to dress. I left the police station and vomited.

My GP practice was a few hundred yards away and the nurse sent me to the same emergency department where I had been arrested, this time for a CT scan and treatment for dehydration (I had been losing fluid from the burns and was too unwell to drink or eat anything while in custody

The problem six years ago wasn’t primarily the police. Things went wrong, and weren’t done well, but they were investigated and they did apologise to a limited extent. The main problem here wasn’t the emergency department or the burns unit either. We had all been let down.

I’m not here to listen to excuses for this kind of behaviour by mental health staff. I’ve spent years trying to understand it and do not believe there are excuses that I haven’t heard yet. What we need now is change. Deliberately excluding people from mental health care kills.

Deliberate exclusion of certain people and groups from access to mental health care kills people in a variety of ways. It destroys lives. It changed mine forever. I’m not the same person I was before this. We need caring mental health staff to help eliminate this type of practice

It is not acceptable to leave it to patients like myself to change practices like this. Deliberate exclusion from help is a failure of professionalism, neglect of clinical standards, and a patient safety issue. Leaving that to patients who have been harmed to set right is not ok.

What are @rcpsych @theRCN @RCollEM psychology, social work, and other professions doing to protect patients who this is done to? This isn’t something that just happens to people. This is something that is *done to* people by actions and omissions of some of their members.

I’m clearing out my flat but I’m going to keep this bag. I’m going to show it to anyone who needs to see it who says that people “just need to ask for help” for their mental health, and who believes that the right help is always there. It isn’t. There is a lot of work still to do