Community Based Healthcare for Autism.

Autistic Conservative Charlie Keeble today writes for the Havering Daily today about the value of community based healthcare and the impact of the pandemic on medical autonomy. 

Many years ago I had a need for some autism related therapy after I had trouble with my mental health. The problem was a result of suffering from difficulties coping with long term unemployment. It was a very bad time for me and I was struggling to deal with it. All I had to cope with were the services of people who could only offer me access courses but no job opportunities. But the way I felt trapped in this cycle made me feel patronised by useless pathetic do-gooders. 

It made me feel lost and my mental health got bad, and I needed some sort of therapy. I went to my GP and I took up Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to treat my mental issues. The service was quite good and I felt much better by the end of it. But there was one major problem, which was the long and lengthy wait time for the service. I applied for CBT therapy in February 2008 but I didn’t get my first session until June that year. It was awful having to wait that long just to get my mental health sorted out. 

There are some criticisms of the NHS that I could make, and there are probably many people who feel that it’s the government at fault here. After all, there are many cynics who blame the Conservative Party for the way they run the NHS. But you can hardly blame them for all the faults of the health services in Havering. There have been several attempts to fix the health service in the past but they have never been executed effectively.

The biggest frustration for me as an autistic man about the NHS is the way it’s structured and that does not do well enough for psychology services. These inefficiencies are rooted in it’s top down centralised order from the state, which means that it has to deal with so many people to serve the whole country with provisions that not every community benefits from. 

One of the most frequent things I hear from the left is that the NHS is going to be sold off by the Tories. That is a lie. The NHS doesn’t need to be sold off, it needs to be fixed. The NHS is worshipped like a religion and it’s followers see any attempt to fix it as blasphemy. This stupid assertion astounds me. What it needs is to be decentralised so that the hospitals and the doctors have more control over their own services and funding. 

I want the NHS to be reduced of it’s control from the top down and make it more community ordered. One of the built-in problems for centralised health care is the long waits. This is because the NHS Trust gets to decide which treatments and services has the highest priority. It’s reflected in the way that the emergency treatments take precedence over the non-emergency operations. That’s why mental health treatments like psychotherapy get less support and provisions that the local pharmacies have to do with dishing out happy pills instead. 

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the NHS became even more problematic, in fact it became weaponised and used to exert power over people’s medical autonomy. When the first lockdown came in April 2020 I took some opportunities in it to begin with so that I could show people how the way I use my autism to cope with social isolation. Particularly where I am not a socially active person and I can make my own sanctuary so that I don’t need to go outside. That way I way I could show people how to cope with the isolation they had to contend with. 

But then after a while I saw that there was some other autistics who were not so fortunate. The Covid restrictions meant that many disabled people had become lonely, depressed and anxious from the situation. I got a bit queasy myself in lockdown, but I understood that the vaccine had to be developed and the virus contained. But I didn’t like the way the medical advisors to the government suggested controlling people’s freedom of movement to protect them.   

They said that the NHS had to be protected from being overwhelmed by Covid infections. One idea that the Trust didpursue was granting GPs the freedom to offer DNR orders to intellectually disabled patients in care homes in their medical files without their consent. This meant they could euthanise disabled people who caught Covid when they were vulnerable and not able to properly consent.

This sickened me so much that I couldn’t believe that the health service was now promoting eugenics ideas. It made memistrust and resent the NHS even more. I can’t believe I came out and clapped for those carers when they were secretlydeemed people like me not worth saving. I’ve shared thisstory on social media and some of those protective of the NHS just deflected the blame onto the Conservatives. They were so supportive of the NHS that they were happy to have those refusing the vaccine to be blocked from getting medical help or working in the NHS. These supporters of authoritarianism who loved centralised healthcare were creating a medical apartheid. 

That medical apartheid showed how much the NHS is about power and control of the nation’s health. This pandemic had made a monster out of our health service. I have been double jabbed and I am supportive of vaccines and I loathe antivaxxers, but I am also supportive of people’s rights to choose their medicine and healthcare. There are alternatives to mask and vaccine mandates and locking people into their homes was not a good strategy to begin with. The media even worsened the pandemic by pushing fear to exaggerate the dangers of Covid.

What I want to see for the health and wellbeing of the country is to get the control of the nation’s health out of the hands of the government and into the communities. Get rid of the NHS Trust and instead have a community orientated healthcare system. That way money is not mismanaged and wastefully spent as it is on bureaucracy, the healthcare services are more varied and widely offered according to the communities that they serve, and for autistics like me I get to have the right support services so I can nurture the effects of disability in a constructive way with good life skills. I reckon Havering could open up to bright ideas for autism to flourish in a good way.