Here follows the letter sent by email to CAMHS General Manager, Wanda Reynolds just prior to my ‘walk’ on the 27th April, 2022. This letter is, for all intent and purposes, a suicide note. I now know that the psychological distress felt by me at this time was bordering on mental disorder. My confusion was profound and I was beginning to doubt my own sense of reality.
Things would only begin to make sense seven weeks later when the first of my access to records requests was disclosed. Shocking details revealed in my medical records marked a turning point for me. I will write about my medical records in detail much later.
For the attention of Wanda Reynolds
Copies sent to Dr Emma Dougan, GP, Bramblys Grange Medical Practice; Phoebe Evans, social worker, North East Adult Mental Health
With reference to my last email to you I have just submitted the Access to Records Request although it will likely prove too little, too late.
It’s been almost four weeks since I collected my art therapy drawings from Dora. Four months’ worth of painful, traumatic therapy with Sally summerised by a sad and pitiful collection of disgusting drawings made by me at my most vulnerable, casually and carelessly folded and stuffed in an envelope without any acknowledgment that any therapy had actually taken place. It’s almost as though the wish was that I had simply dropped dead. Maybe that’s what it’s all been about; despite my earnest, heartfelt letters asking for the meeting with Sally to be rescheduled, the strategy was to wear me down to the point where I just gave up. Well, now I’m giving up. Over these last twenty-six days I have been making my plans. By the time you read this I will be well on my way to dropping dead.
As of tomorrow afternoon I will be many miles away and about to set off on a journey. I will be walking, without food or water, for between three and five days. Dehydration will probably get the better of me by day three. I will almost certainly drop dead before the fifth day and I will be all the better for it. If I make it to a designated train station and manage to return to Basingstoke then I may, or may not, count myself as worthy of being alive. I fully expect to die. Hopefully I will find a good tree to lie under. The route I’ve chosen is largely remote so I will not be disturbed. I’m done with this life. I’m too tired. Depressed. Heartbroken. I feel used up. Betrayed. Unloved. Rejected. Worthless.
The last three months and especially the last twenty-six days have been a torment for me, so much so that I can barely find the words to describe the feeling of utter desolate abandonment. Nor can I account for the truly overwhelming confusion and chaos that has troubled every hour of my waking mind. I am plagued by wracking doubts and cannot make much sense of the last eight months let alone the last three. Had I been lied to? Manipulated and deceived? Was it Sally herself who wanted to renege on that promised last meeting or was she persuaded and her judgement finally overruled by her supervisor and then, ultimately, yourself? How much of my therapy with Sally was real? Did she really have my best interest at heart or was I just an inconvenient component, an unpalatable addendum to my daughter? Just how disgusting was I at the end and was she desperate to shower herself of all trace of me? Was she appalled by my affection for her? Disturbed by my perseverance? Did she end up thinking I was a ‘weirdo’ or worried that I was becoming obsessed? It horrifies me to imagine my words or actions may have caused her distress. I can’t live with that. I feel ashamed of myself and would like to have had the opportunity to make amends. I could have put her mind at rest. Sally could have put my mind at rest. I had so many questions lined up in anticipation of that meeting. I also had so, so much emotion invested in anticipation of that meeting. I love Sally dearly. Now I am devastatingly heartbroken. The least I deserved was closure, a chance to see her and, if necessary, say ‘goodbye’, properly. You recommended some services to ‘support me at this difficult time’. That counsel was trite. Adult mental health services are woefully inadequate; I’ve just had my third mental health assessment but nobody understands me well enough to be able to recommend appropriate therapy. And just who would I trust now? Who would I dare be vulnerable with now? Who would I rely on now?
I’m being made to feel bad for having ‘romantic’ feelings for Sally. I’m being discarded like something dirty and unwelcome. Yet I’ve read the literature, poured over countless hours of professional clinical commentary on the subject from the wider psychiatric community. Qualified consensus approves those feelings and considers such profound attachment normal in a healthy therapeutic relationship. A good therapist understands and welcomes those feelings because they recognise the opportunity to heal deep emotional wounds caused by trauma. Instead I have been rejected, again. Abandoned. By proxy. With indifference.
Every health professional that I’ve met over these last few months has unanimously agreed that the way I treated was bad. The ending, or rather the lack of closure was not right. Especially for someone like me who is almost certainly suffering complex-PTSD
Better just to drop dead.
I have often imagined walking into a giant blender with a thousand rotating razor blades but I’ll walk this slow walk instead. Dying slowly and deliberately is the best option. No violence and no distraction.
The petty part of me wants you to feel guilt at this. There have been too many people like you in my life that haven’t taken me seriously. The better part of me sends this letter to you in the fragile hope that you will learn from this. I am dismayed to learn that you are in charge of 11 CAMHS teams and have undue influence over those that have genuine empathy and insight. You have acted entirely as a ‘general manager’, in keeping with the conduct of an inflexible and dogmatic bureaucrat, without access to nuance or empathic finesse. You should get back into the field and get your hands dirty again. You should have trusted Sally. You should have trusted her judgement. She was the one in the trenches opposite me. She was the one with first-hand experience of my trauma. She was the sole witness to my anguish, my tears, my begging and pleading. It was visceral to her, messy and real. She was best qualified. Hopefully there will be an official inquiry and you will learn and do better next time.
I desperately wanted to see Sally again, even if it were just one last time, even if it were just for the opportunity to ask her to help me make sense of things. So much of the last few months makes absolutely no fucking sense to me, at all. You denied me an opportunity to bring some order to the chaos. It would have been such a small thing for you to have granted. It’s such an unfathomably destructive large thing you chose to do instead. I accepted the challenges of therapy to be in service to my daughter and it was as though I had been in theatre for heart surgery and cut open without anaesthetic only for the surgeon to walk out half way through without even stitching me back up. You just added another chapter of hideous intergenerational trauma. That’s on you. If you had let Sally stitch me up again, however hasty and clumsy, it might have just saved my life.
Mark Stock
April 26th, 2022
