Primary healthcare is one of the few universal services that everyone can access, and where individual adults and young people can have confidential conversations with someone whose interest is their health and well-being. Those in General Practice are perfectly placed to be professionally curious if they feel that their patient is experiencing abuse at the hands of those to whom they should normally look to for love and care. IRIS gives GPs and their colleagues the knowledge and confidence to act on that curiosity, and a direct link into local domestic abuse services that can then offer the patient the support that they need.
“That conversation changed my life.’ A survivor’s story.
My family kept out of the way and I wasn’t allowed to have friends round. I felt useless and depressed – I couldn’t do anything right. Everything made him angry and resentful and he took it out on me and the kids – called me names and told me that I was to blame for his miserable life and over time I came to think that he was right and somehow it was my fault. I was tired, on edge all the time, trying to keep the peace and avoid doing anything to make him lash out. He would come home late at night and rant at me until the early hours. I would try to keep the noise down so the children didn’t hear. I don’t think they heard. When he was really angry he would punch the walls and even come at me, waving his fists. He only actually hit me once or twice. And he never liked that dog.
Sometimes he would be lovely and make out that he still loved me like he used to. And I would think – well, maybe we’ll be OK? But those moments were rare and never lasted – leaving me wondering what I had done wrong – yet again.
It was when I went to see my GP for something to make me sleep that he asked me how things were at home. It came as such a surprise I just burst into tears. He was so kind. I told him how I felt useless and low and just not good enough for anything – that I was such a failure and made my husband so angry with me. My GP was lovely – he listened and it seemed like he understood exactly how I felt. Talking to him helped me to see how badly I was being treated – and that I didn’t deserve to be bullied and scared and ignored by someone that should care for me. As I was talking, it all started to seem like an awful soap on the TV – like it was happening to someone else – not my life at all. But it was, and for the first time I realised that it could be different. That maybe I deserved better.
The doctor told me that there were local organisations that I could talk to who would give me advice about what I could do. They would help me to be safe and not afraid anymore. I hadn’t ever thought that I had any choice – just saw this as the life that I had been given. I certainly didn’t know that there was help for someone like me.
That conversation changed my life.