Arrested and in crisis
I wrote this in early April, just after it happened, but for various mental health reasons held off on posting until now. Includes discussion of suicide, self harm, and police violence.
Last week I was arrested after committing an act of criminal damage while in what might most accurately be described as a mental health crisis. Every individual person I dealt with during my passage through the system was kind and respectful, and yet the overall experience was deeply traumatic.
I think the police understood I was not well when they first arrived on the scene. I had stripped to the waist, throwing my clothes into the street. I informed the arresting officer that I was already dead, and supplied the requested personal details in the past tense. Even the former friend who was the primary victim of my lashing out told them that I was crazy.
I was fully aware of everything that was happening, but my only thought was to make it end as quickly as possible. Handcuffed in the back of a police van, stuck in traffic on the way to the custody suite, I banged my head against the wall, hoping to knock myself out or worse. Whenever an officer spoke to me, I asked for morphine, or for them to taze me on maximum voltage.
Making things worse, I was far from home. I supplied the name and contact details of the mental health team treating me, but late in the afternoon they couldn't be reached. Instead, the officers defaulted to a local team who knew nothing about me. They arranged for me to speak to someone by telephone, but I was still hurting so badly that all I could do was describe various ways I'd thought of to end my life. This was enough to convince them that I needed to be transferred to hospital, but that took an interminable time to arrange. Meanwhile I had to wait in a cell with a rotating cast of police officers watching me to prevent me doing anything deadly.
They took everything I could conceivably harm myself with, including my hoodie. When I complained of feeling cold, they informed me that no blankets were available, but also that it was actually quite warm and I shouldn't feel cold. Since I had, in a misguided attempt to assert some autonomy, emptied the proffered cup of water over my head, I wasn't convinced. They stopped me hitting my head on the walls, refused my requests for morphine or large quantities of paracetamol, and tried to keep me talking, although my chief topic of conversation was how I wished I had never been born.
In the early evening, they finally arranged a transfer to hospital. The ambulance supplied two blankets, along with a warning that they could be taken away if I was "silly". By this time, the worst of the agitation had worn off, and I was exhausted enough to just huddle in the blankets through the protracted process of admission to hospital. Since there were no mental health spaces for me, I was sent to the nearest Casualty department, where i waited a couple of hours before being admitted.
Things briefly looked up. I got my hoodie back, although by that point I preferred the blanket. I also got my phone back, and spoke to family and friends, which felt like a lifeline. I accepted and ate a snack box, and felt ready to cooperate.
A psychiatrist asked me some questions, mostly about my history. I showed him where I had been self harming by picking my skin, described my only previous suicide attempt, and briefly felt better for having got things out in the open. I suspected I was still too agitated to have a hope of sleeping, but I dutifully lay down and closed my eyes.
Then, at approximately 2 in the morning, someone informed me I was being discharged.
It was hard to take in. Apparently the medical side had decided I didn't need care, the police side declined to take me back, and I would need to leave because they needed the bed for another patient, which I cynically suspected was the real reason for discharging me. They said I could sit in the waiting room until I was ready to leave, but they were washing their hands of responsibility for me.
The only person in my support system still awake was my US-based fiancée, who, by virtue of being US-based, couldn't do much to help. Ze kept me talking for an hour or so, and then I decided a return to the police station was the lesser evil. But when I arrived, I learned there was no longer a place for me there. I wasn't in custody, so they had no responsibility for me either.
I spent another twelve hours pinging around London. At another police station, I was offered a chair and a place to charge my phone, but no actual help. Some of my possessions were still in my former friend's house, including my binder, which by malign chance was drying on an airer at the time of my arrest. I became obsessed with finding a way to retrieve this, and called 101 half a dozen times.
Nobody seemed particularly concerned, even when I stressed that I couldn't retrieve it myself without risking a further breach of the peace and that I had nowhere to go until I had retrieved it. I left messages, tried email and chat, called every two hours, and the best I got was an assurance that an email had been sent regarding my request.
The most ludicrous response was from a pair of PCSOs at Kings Cross, where I returned in the hopes that familiar surroundings would somehow help matters. They heard me howling with frustration at yet another fruitless phone call and came to offer assistance. Somehow, they got it into their head I was asking for a lift, and referred me to the tube. The impossibility of approaching my former friend alone went completely over their heads.
If I'd relied on the police, I would probably have remained at Kings Cross until I collapsed from exhaustion. But my former friend took it upon himself to notify my 19 year old kid, who managed to persuade him to bag up my remaining possessions and leave them in his garden for me to collect. Once that was done, I took the next train north and returned to my home, where I could at least rest in safety.
It's hard to say what effect this has had on me. It hasn't helped my mental health, but that was already in a rocky state even before the incident began. I was already deeply cynical about the ability of systems and institutions to get me the help I so obviously need, so this has done no more than underline it.
When I talk to friends, they find the 2 o'clock discharge the hardest to believe. We all - including me - took it for granted I would be admitted to hospital for at least medium term treatment. Or cared for until morning and transferred back to the care of my local mental health team. It's hard to see how I was ill enough at 8 in the evening to be transferred to to place of safety and well enough six hours later - without any treatment beyond an extremely brief assessment - to be sent into a strange city completely on my own.
The best I can speculate is that I was a confusing edge case for them. Most of the people they deal with are Londoners who have at least a rudimentary support network in the city. It was my bad luck that I was a traveller, whose only support was the friend I had just spectacularly alienated. They didn't know what to do with me, and they responded by making me someone else's problem.
I'm sure they would justify themselves by saying it all worked out. I found my way home eventually, exhausted but otherwise unharmed. Any longer term damage is not going to be traced back to their decision.
And that is really the problem. Somehow we've built a system where someone going through a mental health crisis a hundred miles from home can be cut adrift by the stroke of a pen and left to sink or swim, and it's not really anybody's fault or responsibility. I don't pretend to have any answers, but that is not the way the system ought to work.