Our 14-year-old was recently diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder after a sustained period of risk-taking and depression that saw them truanting from school, being physically violent, going missing from home at night and being brought home by the police.
We sought help from a psychologist, who did an assessment but said she was not prepared to treat our child until there had been an assessment by a psychiatrist, as she suspected ADHD. We live in Warwickshire – cited in your article as having the longest waiting list of any part of England for child and adolescent mental health services (UK children waiting 16 months on average for ADHD and autism screening – study, 17 July).
We reluctantly sought a private diagnosis, at considerable cost, and our child is now medicated, with improved behaviour. But we have now encountered another problem: our request for a shared care agreement with our GP – where the GP assumes responsibility for prescribing – has been refused.
We are told that it is the policy of our GP consortium never to enter into shared care arrangements when diagnosis was initiated in the private healthcare sector.
This cruel policy envisages no shared care agreement down the line, leaving our child with the prospect of 70-plus years of private prescription (current cost £82 a month), and which seems to ignore the unacceptably long waiting times for an NHS diagnosis. Our argument, that our diagnosed and treated child will use up significantly fewer police, social care and school resources, appears to have gone unheard.
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