THE princess pink blanket seemed wholly out of place. Festooned with a smattering of yellow stars and polkadots and tiny crowns, it would have been more at home in a toddler’s room than in the back of a police car. Beneath it, Katie Simpkins was in crisis. Experiencing an acute mental breakdown, she was left to sleep in the back of a car. A police car instead of a bed. Remind me – what year is this?

In what world is it acceptable for someone suffering – and I mean that word with it’s fullest gravity – to be left without acute care because there’s a bed shortage? In 2011 I had a mental health crisis. I’d given birth, come home and gotten sick. Really sick. Really quickly. And no one knew what to do. When I should have been smiling and fawning over my new son, I was looking for the undo button as some inner force pried open my grip on reality. I was consumed with terror. Every nerve jangled, my head was full of wasps, my ears with disembodied whispers. I’ve had broken bones, dog bites and sickness. I would have taken any and all of them in a heartbeat if such a trade was possible.

During this time I was watched over, processed, admitted, cared for, processed again, bounced out and left to my own devices. I still had a year of recovery ahead when we were shooed out the door of the hospital. I wasn’t bleeding, vomiting or mangled in some way, so I could be moved on. I felt like an animal. There’s a meat-hook in my chest whenever I think of it – still.

So it was difficult to look at Katie Simpkins’s picture. Under that blanket I know there was a gestalt of acute personal pain, and here it was, paraded on social media and homepages. It seemed nauseatingly reminiscent of the time not so long ago when the Bethlem “lunatics” were a pay-to-see human zoo spectacle. We may not have our jangling chains, but too often mental health patients receive second class care.

If you care to look, there are plenty of similarly horrid stories. Last year, a man in Staffordshire spent 64 hours in police custody because four hospitals denied him care. His abandonment by the mental health services in the area meant that custody was the only option for crisis-management. This, as with the Katie Simpkins case, is what chronic underfunding looks like. Under no circumstances is custody an appropriate substitute for care. It cannot be relied on as a place of safety for a person in mental distress. Just because their suffering isn’t written in bone and sinew, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, or can be filed away to deal with later.

To outsiders, your body is functioning. Flames may be licking the inside of your skull, but on the surface all appears well. You can’t splint a mind. You can’t bathe it, wrap it in a bandage and leave it up to the miracles of biology to heal itself. But don’t be fooled by the cloak of invisibility – mental pain is as much of a crisis as the physical. It deserves the same rapid access to care that any physical ailment does. Our health services cannot continue to treat the mind and the body as two separate, unrelated and incomparable entities.

A report earlier this year by The Independent Commission has highlighted around 500 patients a month have to travel over 50km to access the healthcare they need because there are no local inpatient services or beds available. NHS: this is your shame.

We cannot and should not continue to rely on non-experts to be surrogate caregivers. We cannot and should not put up with mental health being unfairly triaged below the physical. We cannot and should not expect people in mental distress to jump through hoops for their own care.

When I was ill, my husband was left to hold the fort. And the baby. And everything else that a typical life demanded of him. He was not an expert, and was experiencing his own very real trauma simultaneously, yet was deemed the most appropriate (read “available”) primary caregiver.

For too long we’ve blithely ignored the effect of this care outsourcing. The effect on police. The effect on families. The effect on any one else having to plug the gap. They’re already doing a job – how can they be expected to do another? In every instance here, the NHS is failing not only the patient, but those who are left to pick up the slack. Mental illness is not as invisible as we like to pretend it is – you just have to look in the right places. Look at those left having to provide solace, support and safety when they have no real idea how to.