Before I moved to the UK I spent nearly all of my teenage years interacting with the mental health services of my home country. I've been entrenched in the system since I was 13, having my family's pockets picked by the professionals while I was none the wiser.
There was a certain quota/number of visits you would need to hit. Then like clockwork, your insurance provider would force you to shell out extra money if you wanted to continue using these services, all while the therapists and psychiatrists offer no reprive from this and gladly will see you out the door when you can't pay up.
Having seen both sides of the lawn, the grass isn't always greener. Both gardens are wilted, vile, and full of shit- only with slightly different aesthetics when it comes to their states of dilapidation. In the UK, there is no grass left, it's all barren, the NHS staffing schedules are just like empty little dirt patches. In countries with no nationalised healthcare, you have weeds growing instead of the grass. There are services available, but they are utterly useless.
The thing I have realized in my almost 8 years of dealing with the mental health industry, is that once you become a complex case, they'd rather you go off and vanish lest they have to actually ponder uncomfortable realities or think outside the box. Sure, the platitudes, the cognitive behavioral therapy pushing, the hashtags and the it's okay to not be okay bullshit, may very well help some people. Yet, they seem to not have the slightest care about the fact these things don't help us.
I have taken over a dozen psychiatric medications, and not even once could a psychiatrist explain the mechanism of action of the drugs they were doling out into the hands of someone who was a 14 year old child at the time. They couldn't explain if I actually had an imbalance of serotonin, and ignored my statements regarding the abuse I was going through at home and at school.
The continued interactions I had with therapists and psychologists only reinforced my belief that such a system is inherently broken. I have always needed caring relationships, someone to help me with tasks around the house, who will assist me in times when my disability becomes too much to bear, but such help does not exist. Therapists and drugs can't fill the gap left by a lack of human connection, trauma, and illness.
You are expected to somehow find catharsis by venting to strangers who hold your autonomy in their fists and will gladly clamp down on it the moment you mention that life may not be worth living. What better way to make someone think, 'gee, I shouldn't ctb after all' than restraining them and injecting them with Haldol if they don't want to have their dignity stripped away with involuntary sectioning and psychiatric holds!
Despite all this, I was willing to give the help another shot recently, much like you OP. The NHS won't deal with ptsd, so I sought out local charities that offered support for victims of severe traumas. The requirements included things like: you must not be suicidal (because it means you don't truly want to get better and aren't in the mindset for recovery, according to these people ) the traumatic event must not have been recent (why?) and you have to agree to be on a waiting list for over a year. No thanks.
I would say that the NHS and mental health services in general are run by absolute clowns, but that would mean they had something amusing or funny to offer rather than just being a self fulfilling prophecy of a comedy of errors.