As a child, Amy was often violently attacked. At 15, she was threatened with a knife. Now diagnosed with complex PTSD, she’s spent over a decade isolated at home with her mum, desperately seeking help. She has seen a psychiatrist only once.<\/p>\n
“I was self harming and felt suicidal and didn’t want to be alive anymore,” says Amy, who’s stuck on the long waiting list for NHS mental health treatment.<\/p>\n
She has bounced up and down the list for years despite being known by crisis teams at her local hospital and GP surgery.<\/p>\n
Amy is one of thousands of patients across England caught in the backlog of mental health care.<\/p>\n
Exclusive analysis for the BBC by charity Rethink Mental Illness reveals a stark – and widening – inequality between mental and physical healthcare. There are 12 times more patients waiting longer than 18 months for treatment compared to those with physical conditions.<\/p>\n
Despite four emergency ambulance callouts this year, Amy remains on an indefinite waiting list for severe mental health treatment – with no timeline and no clear path out of crisis.<\/p>\n
“I just get told to wait and that services are struggling,” she says. “Sometimes I feel really angry and like screaming and cry all day because I can’t move on with my life.”<\/p>\n
Amy finally got onto a college course last year but was asked to leave after a crisis.<\/p>\n
“I feel like I’m going round and round in circles and end up in the same situation every single day,” she says. Amy’s mum no longer works, in order to care for her.<\/p>\n
Their story reflects the harsh reality behind the statistics: lives unravelling while help remains out of reach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As a child, Amy was often violently attacked. At 15, she was threatened with a knife. Now diagnosed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65460,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[97,259,260],"class_list":{"0":"post-65459","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-mental-health","10":"tag-mentalhealth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65459","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65459\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}