Joan waited for months for care, despite serious red flags.

Transcript

So what ends up happening is, so she refers me to one hospital. The hospital and I play phone tag. So now months are going by, no one’s seeing me. And this is the main reason why I chose to do this study is because of this experience. So she’s addressed that I have auditory hallucinations, that I have a year and a half old child so she has concerns over obviously his safety – my safety, whatever. So that referral’s gone into the hospital, the hospital and I play phone tag, I can’t get a hold of anybody because they keep sending me back to fucking triage or whoever it is, intake. Intake won’t even tell me what the hell’s going on. So now we’re past Christmas, we’re getting into the new year. I’m at an appointment for my son and my doctor says to me ‘Oh by the way, have you heard from this hospital?’ And I’m like ‘I’ve been trying to get a hold of them’ – yada-yada, ‘we’re playing phone tag.’ Nothing [unintelligible]. New Year’s passes, we’re into February now, still nothing. And I see her again for an appointment for my son and she says, or I said to her ‘Like yeah, no one is getting a hold of me. Like you know this is crazy, because if I was… like I’m not, but if I was somebody who was going to kill my kid, I would have killed my kid by now.’

Like something crazy would have happened, and then the media’s going to sit here and look at ‘Oh this horrible woman’ or ‘oh this’ you know, somebody did something to their child, but they were asking, you know they’re finally in the help that they need to get, but you know, they’re not where they should be. ‘Yeah for some reason the hospital has decided not to take you on as a patient.’ I’m like ‘What?’

So she was good about it, like she got onto it right away. And she was like ‘Yeah, this is a concern.’ Like that we were asking for mental health services, we know it’s slow in this city, everyone’s aware that it’s slow in this city, but nothing’s fucking happening. Like, I didn’t even get an intake done by that hospital. So she sent off the requisition to a new hospital. Within a week the new hospital called me. Within three weeks I had my intake done, and they said ‘This is going to be you know, it could be anywhere from a two to three-month wait list.’ And I just got the call a week ago that I have my first appointment with the psychiatrist on the 16th. So that’s good, but we started in November, it’s May. That’s nuts.

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