Dr. Coleman Noctor

In terms of accessibility?

Oh, it's very grim.

People say, oh, you're great.

That'll be great for your work.

I say, I don't want to advertise my work.

I'm overburdened, oversubscribed.

And I don't take any new people because I had a waiting list.

It just became unwieldy, you know.

Year on year, it gets worse, you know, from the point of view of the amount of people looking for support and for help.

And so, you know, I would have said back five or six years ago, you might have got two or three, four emails a week of people looking for that.

Generally, you get about 10 to 15 now, you know, and over COVID, it was about 20.

And unfortunately, I've come to this where I have to have this cut and paste reply to people to say, I'm really sorry, I can't reply.

which feels kind of distant or a bit removed.

But in reality, I was spending two or three hours trying to talk to people who I was never going to be able to see.

And so you're at that dilemma that, you know, if you could clone yourself, it would be wonderful.

But no, and even things like there's a lot of people looking for assessments at the moment for things like ASD, ADHD.

And so the public system is completely overwhelmed and then people are turning to the private system.

And even the private system has long waiting lists now.

But then when you get your diagnosis from the private system, the level of intervention isn't there.

So there's no right time to experience a mental health problem, but there's certainly not good times.