Tips for dealing with mental health professionals

Marshall Whiting: It isn’t easy to communicate with health professionals because often they believe that the carer knows virtually nothing about the affliction that their son or daughter or husband or wife has. Often, it’s the contrary case, we know more especially once you’re down the road after 2 or 3 years, than actually the professionals themselves.

Ruth Hennem: When you are communicating with health care professionals you will find that you get on with some of them better than others as you do in everyday life. I think you need to know what you want to achieve and keep on persisting until you get what you want to achieve really, or keep trying different people until you find a way to solve a problem.

Marshall Whiting: Dealing with health professionals, you do develop tips, you do develop a methodology. My particular one is to wear a suit. Because if you wear a suit, strangely enough that seems to impress some people.

The other tips are to be absolutely on time for all meetings and to insist that meetings are held with minutes and that papers are produced. The difficulty that many carers face is that they are excluded because of confidentiality grounds. Many times I find that the ‘confidentiality trick’ as its known is a get out. ‘We won’t include you in our thinking because your son hasn’t given consent’. Well he has given consent, and you make absolutely clear at the beginning of every meeting that all conversations are completely open. That also helps the professional as well because he or she can develop an understanding of sufferers’ needs without this problem of confidentiality.

Elaine Moore: If it helps to take a friend, or another family member with you, say ‘I want that person present,’ if not, go to an organisation like Rethink, or MIND, or somewhere like that and get one of their workers to accompany you, or get them to write the letter for you.

It’s about getting your voice heard and the first and foremost thing you need to know is, who is the prime person for the person you care for, who is their psychiatrist... when they change psychiatrist, make sure you know the key people in their care, make sure you know who is supposed to be their social worker so that you can be part of the team 

Marshall Whiting: Other tips that I’ve go is to smile a lot, to engage the whole staff of the practice, to volunteer for whatever need arises, this would include research, it would include speaking at meetings, it would include...just being pleasant to people, I think, gets you a long way.