Letter from a service user (edited for confidentiality)

Laura McMurtrie

Chief Executive Officer

Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership NHS Trust

Jenner House

Langley Park

Chippenham

SN15 1 GG

15 May 2012

Dear Laura McMurtrie

I am angry and dismayed to learn that the Psychopharmacology Unit is to close. I have been a service user of the clinic for several years and it has literally given me my life back. Experiencing severe depression not only destroyed my life but also that of my husband and family.  Depression led me to feel unbearably sad, hopeless, ashamed, worthless and unable to function emotionally, cognitively and functionally. The worst part was an inability to have feelings towards my husband and family. I felt dead inside. I had to give up my job as a clinical nurse specialist and lecturer in palliative care. I had reached the point of despair despite the best efforts of my specialist and the clinical team. I remained severely ill. I rarely responded to medications, ECT and psychological therapies and required numerous admissions to my local mental health unit and intensive care in the community. I did not want to live. Eventually my specialist considered that my local services had run out of options and with the approval of xxxxxxxxt I was referred to the Psychopharmacology clinic at Bristol.

I met Dr Malizia, whose kindness, compassion and clinical skills are unique in my experience, and for the first time in five years I started to realise that treatment resistant severe depression could be treated and overcome. Xxxxxxxx .............. Unbelievably I soon started to recover. Over the next few months my emotions, cognitive skills and functional ability returned. My family was overjoyed and for the first time in ten years I began to feel like the xxxx I thought I had lost. Words cannot express how grateful my family and I are xxxx

The Psychopharmacology clinic is unique and offers support, treatment and hope to those service users whose mental health teams, however skilled, are unable to provide. Its loss would deny individuals like me the specialist skills available at the clinic. To lose such a centre of excellence, built up over a number of years, is deplorable and short sighted. Depression is a significant cost to the NHS and a centre which offers the hope of recovery through innovative treatments should be treasured not disbanded.

I would like to know why the clinic is shutting and how it was decided and by whom. I believe I am entitled to this information under the Freedom of Information Act. I hope you will reconsider this decision. I look forward to your reply.

Yours sincerely