Professionals know that mental health is complex – and that MDMA won’t help

Rose Cartwright’s article (I was the poster girl for OCD. Then I began to question everything I’d been told about mental illness, 13 April) claims to expose “the fallacy at the heart of mental healthcare”, arguing that the sector – including but not limited to psychiatrists, occupational therapists, social workers, employment advisers, psychologists, dementia nurses, experts by experience, care home staff, art therapists, carers and support workers – fails to grasp the multifaceted nature of mental health and, instead, reduces it to an illness/treatment model.

I was part of a recent multi-disciplinary team meeting. A psychiatrist shared their concern about patients facing homelessness and asked what might be done. To which a support worker replied that funding for the local homelessness organisation – a key resource for such patients – had just been cut. Everyone, including the psychiatrist, slumped in their chair, knowing that homelessness is a potent risk factor for addiction, mental health crises and suicide. Without such organisations, these risks often become a reality.

Those who work in mental healthcare are all too aware of the fallacy that is actually at play: that good mental health can be sustained while the wider social infrastructure (housing, training, employment, social care) is obliterated.

Yet the idea that mental health professionals are simply hapless lemmings bimbling around a dusty old medical model was not my main issue with this article. My main issue was the suggestion that MDMA may be more helpful than regulated care for mental ill health. I have seen a number of patients sectioned and admitted due to drug-induced psychosis. One of these patients had taken MDMA and, unfortunately, had a young child who had to be taken into care while their parent recovered.

The author of the article clearly understands the profound impact this is likely to have had on this child. Please can she be a little careful in what she writes and therefore promotes, and the Guardian in what it publishes.
Dr Rachel McNulty
Junior doctor, in training to become a psychiatrist, Ramsgate

• Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.