I have found it really difficult to get help on the NHS (sorry to any American readers - complaining about a free health service is odd, I know). I don't earn a lot, and frankly it's my only option - I have barely anything left at the end of the month after rent and food.
I don't get along well with drugs, which they offer me every time regardless of what I am going through. I have suffered with anxiety and depression for over ten years, most of it on my medical record but still getting therapy is like banging my head against a brick wall. At my lowest point a few years back, when I genuinely didn't think I was in my own body any more, I wrote a letter to the doctor explaining my history. Suicide has happened once in my family, and been attempted numerous times by different family members (including my own mother). I explained this, plus various other difficult aspects of my upbringing, and bam, I was called in straight away to be assessed by a psychiatrist. This was after years of going back and forth to the doctors and being palmed off with drugs, or that tick-box depression questionnaire they are all so fond of. Anyway, obviously this was a very turbulent time for me - I was living in East London in a rented room in a shared house of 10 people I hardly knew after a particularly nasty breakup. The place was burgled at some point during this time (I actually saw the burglars!) and so I resolved to move. This was right at the point that I had the consultation, and so I (stupidly) told them my new address. No therapy ever came through for me simply because I had changed address.
I'm having a current spout of anxiety at the moment, getting freaked out at crowded situations and thinking I am going to faint pretty much all day at work. I live in Bristol now, and so, hoping the situation might be different here, back I went to the doctors to outwardly ask for therapy. She didn't even offer CBT, or mention a waiting list - she just printed out a page from the internet and told me to look up the areas in which they conduct group therapy. I wasn't really looking for group therapy - the classes they run are not strictly therapy based and not specific to my needs, but anyway, I left the doctors thinking I'd give it a try. I've just looked up the webpage she mentioned and there are no classes remotely near where I live.
I feel despondent and helpless at the moment, and ready right to recoil into myself. Has anyone else had such an experience? What do I have to do to get help? I feel as if they are waiting for me to want to commit suicide before anything gets done.