A new report published today by the independent Mental Health Taskforce to the NHS reveals that: “One in four adults experiences at least one diagnosable mental health problem in any given year” and “Three quarters of people with mental health problems receive no support at all.” Suicide is also rising, the report says, stating that: “A quarter of people who took their own life had been in contact with a health professional in the last week before they died.” And so, the report concludes, David Cameron has pledged an extra one billion pounds per year to mental health care in the NHS, hailing it a mental health “revolution” – it's an odd choice of word.Now, I love the NHS. Every member of my family (except me) works for the NHS as doctors and nurses. As a family, we love the NHS; we are grateful for it; we believe in it; we (except me) have dedicated our lives to it; we support the nurses’ strike and the junior doctors’ strike because NHS staff work exceptionally hard, and save lives and care for people, and it’s one of the best things about this country. That said, this new statistic about mental health care in the NHS saddens me, but it doesn’t surprise me. It’s a bit of a long story…In September 2014 my 32-year-old older sister attempted suicide, taking 178 tablets that she knew (because she’s a doctor) would stop her heart and end her life. She had, I later found out, been contemplating this seriously for some time, and finally on that day at about 4pm, she double locked her front door, switched off her phone, wrote a note I was never permitted to see, and, as far as she knew, committed suicide.Though she hadn’t expressed her intentions to me, she had sent me some concerning texts about something unrelated that morning (her phone bill I think), but her tone in these texts alarmed me. At the time I was living abroad and she was in London, so time was against me, but I alerted our parents and asked them to go round to her house and check on her. They said “She’s probably just asleep”. A few hours later, when still nobody could get through, I insisted they go anyway; by this time it was 11.30pm and she had been unconscious for up to 8 hours. After breaking down the door and finding her half dead, they called the ambulance, who told us that 10 minutes later and we would have been too late.She died repeatedly that night, going into cardiac arrest for about six hours and being resuscitated again and again by the emergency team. Members of that team were her colleagues at the hospitalThen, once they had stabilised her heart, she was moved to intensive care. She was in a coma and we were told she may be brain dead. She was put on a ventilator, her body was chilled to protect her organs and her brain, and she was given lead to counter the effects of the overdose. I remember very well the nurses washing and brushing her hair and moisturising her face; they asked me to bring in her own products from her flat, which I found very touching. They took wonderful care of her.My family and I made friends with the other families whose relatives were on the intensive care ward. There were six beds, and the other five patients had all been in accidents resulting in head trauma; they were unlikely to wake up. Their relatives asked whether my sister had also been in an accident and I hesitated; my mum answered for me, “yes”.Thank god, on about day four, she woke up, but was so delusional from the effects of the drugs in her body that she thought everybody was trying to kill her. She couldn’t verbalise these fears however, because there was a tube in her mouth, which she tried to pull out repeatedly, from sheer panic, and with a look of total terror on her face. It was very painful to watch, and, not recognising me, she kicked me in the stomach, afraid I was trying to hurt her. A nurse comforted me behind the curtain while doctors restrained and eventually sedated her. I wasn’t told at the time, but this was actually quite normal behaviour for a patient waking up from a coma.Once my sister had woken up properly, and was getting her voice back as her throat healed from the tube in her mouth, she started to make more sense, but kept asking what had happened. “You took an overdose and now you’re in intensive care,” and then she would ask me again three minutes later, “Where am I? What happened?” And I would answer, “You took an overdose and now you’re in intensive care.” She would say, “Oh, yes I remember, okay.” Three minutes later we would begin again.When she was able to breathe on her own, I took her for a shower which the nurses kindly allowed me do. She was very thin at that time and felt faint standing up. If I hadn’t have been there, a nurse would have showered her – I’m sure with care and kindness – but my sister is a very private person, and in the strange state she was in, she would have found this embarrassing and difficult; well, as anyone would.When she was well enough to be moved out of intensive care, she was allocated a bed in a ward. A professor (a senior doctor at the hospital) came to talk to us, and told us she was “extremely high risk” because, “this wasn’t a cry for help, this was a very determined attempt to end her life.” I asked the doctors and nurses if I could stay with her in her room and after some persuasion they obliged, providing me with a duvet and a pillow – probably because my sister was a doctor at that hospital; this was not common practice for relatives of patients in these circumstances.