Angry

Now i feel angry - and not with myself, for once. Hopefully I feel angry with the people I should feel anger towards!

The people I trusted to help me let me down (again).
What's more, they are trying to bully and intimidate me into admitting I was in the wrong.

I've had a series of emails which have caused the anger to flare up. For your entertainment (and it is all true, not some made-for-tv film):

After I made my complaint, you may remember I had a difficult time (putting it mildly) persuading the area manager to transfer me to another team. In the course of that time he denied certain things the complaint manager had told / promised me. So I emailed the complaint manager about them and asked for clarification. Her response was:
As stated to you in my previous email (below),I will address all your concerns and respond back to you by 20th August 2007, in accordance with our Complaints Procedure. Please await our response to you.
So I waited.
The response (along with various other omissions) failed to mention this matter.
So, as part of my response to her response, I asked her to look into this and to explain why it had not been addressed.
She replied:
Please note that the concerns raised below were not stated in your original complaint letter ... Please note that if you wish for the contents of your email below to be included aspart of your outstanding concerns, I will require written confirmation from you.
I pointed out that she had said she would address this issue in her response - and asked why she needed me to put it in writing (she already had it as an email!)
Her next response informed me:
The emails below did not state that we are to look at this correspondence as a formal complaint. Please note that our email system is mainly used for staff communication and not for service users as we encourage them to write in, so that, as explained above, we can maintain an efficient record of all correspondences.
Err... as I replied to her, (a) SHE was the one who had told me she would respond to this query in the complaint response and I therefore assumed SHE had chosen to treat it as a complaint; (b) the website contains no mention of preferring complaints in letter form, in fact (c) the complaints part of the website has a phone number and an email address given for people to communicate any complaints!
Her latest response ignores these points, and asks me to use a different email address (not the one she herself has used to email me!) to communicate with her in future.

Question: how does a mentally strong person make sense of all these contradictory messages, let alone a mentally ill one?

So watch out, BLPT, because I'm angry now, and I'm gunning for you. Not just for me, but for all the other poor folk who can't (as my lovely temporary care worker pointed out) continue fighting the system which lets them down. I might not win this battle - I might never get them to admit they made a mistake - but I am going to take it all the way. I am giving them their chance to resolve this, then I will take it to the Healthcare commission, and then (if necessary) to the Ombudsman. I haven't ruled out the possiblity of making a further complaint about the way they are handling this one. Given that one of their stated targets this year is to reduce the number of complaints passed on to the Ombudsman, they should be worried. They won't be, but they should be.

A mental health service should not make its users feel worse. It should carry through on the care plans it has written. It should follow through on its own policies. I'm going to make them accountable here.

It looks very much to me as if blpt hoped they could bullly me into submission. But I have spent years allowing people to bully me into submission, years trying to please them, years agreeing with all the things they told me were wrong with me. This time I want them to say sorry. (Of course, that is also attached to all sorts of past stuff about all the other people I needed to say sorry to me who never did, but there you go). Maybe I won't get blpt to say sorry to me - but I'm not going to roll over and pretend what they did was OK. Oh, and I will make as much noise about it as I can - all suggestions welcome!

On the positive front, EVERYONE I have spoken to about this has assured me I am not to blame. R, my counsellor, and L, the temporary care worker (while mine is away on annual leave) both assured me I am handling this well, doing the right things. R pointed out how blpt are trying to take away my adult voice. You who have commented are also helping me to use my adult voice. I'm frustrated with how hard it is for me to believe that this is not my fault, with the amount of reassurance I need. But I'm fighting now, fighting and angry.