It seems extraordinary to me how biased letters from #mentalhealth professionals about patients are - what they choose to focus on; what they omit.

It’s a pattern - so perhaps it’s the training that makes them home in on certain things & omit all references to others.

There’s something about describing any negative experience of #mentalhealth services or professionals - poor care, unprofessional behaviour, trauma - that MH professionals collectively don’t seem able to address with any measure of objectivity.

It’s a blind spot.

Clearly being brutalised while sectioned (I’ve been diagnosed with #ptsd caused just by this) then neglected in the community (eg I’ve had no therapy for ptsd, & have been excluded from community #mentalhealth care for ages despite living with smi) have an impact on me.

Just as any significant events, good or bad, can have an effect on people going forwards.

Not all of us can just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps or shrug off traumatic events - especially when we *already* have a serious health condition.

Like someone breaking your legs while you’re having a heart attack then expecting you to get up & saunter off down the street.

If you’ve been brutalised by police, it is not a clean slate next time you come across with police officers - it colours the meeting.

It can colour every interaction going forwards.

Especially if that brutalisation caused #ptsd.

If you’ve been brutalised in some other way, say by intimate partner violence, it’s not a neutral experience coming face to face with the brutaliser again.

If you’ve been bitten by a dog, you can be wary of dogs in future.

If that wariness is so severe you’re diagnosed with #ptsd, you might need extra help to overcome it.

There’s a whole industry out there based on that. It’s not a fringe theme or individual failing to be affected by brutalisation & trauma.

What’s been done to me (the brutalisation leading to #ptsd, then the neglect) has a profound effect on me. It impacts on all my interactions with, amongst others, #mentalhealth staff.

But it seems there is a structural inability amongst MH staff to address that objectively.

For years, I thought #mentalhealth services understood what #ptsd was, & understood the impact that ptsd caused by MH services themselves would have, so I didn’t spell it out.

And I kept being treated as the problem.

The dog that bit me didn’t understood I was scared of dogs.

Okay, I thought, #mentalhealth professionals work hard & do their best but they’re not trained that sometimes modern psychiatric practices can harm patients, even to the extent of causing #ptsd; this is new for them; to get my needs met, I’m going to have to help them understand.

It’s exhausting, being left to do the educating, to mention #ptsd caused by #mentalhealth professionals each time, in hopes they’ll be sensitive to my needs.

But, if I don’t mention I was bitten by a dog & the effects, they lock me in a room with a strange dog baring it’s teeth.

When I assumed #mentalhealth professionals understood the nature of #ptsd & the particular effects when caused by MH professionals themselves, they ignored its effects on me; now I explain the effects, every clinic letter ever says I am “preoccupied” with service failings.

It’s as if saying to a #mentalhealth professional that you’ve had a poor experience of MH services (in my case, serious enough to cause #ptsd) is received like criticism of someone’s child or dog.

An objective response, or fair consideration of my experience, seems impossible.