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Because of the professions we are into, people like to talk about us," she said.
The number of patients travelling to seek emergency treatment has more than doubled in two years - from 1,301 people in 2011-12 to 3,024 in 2013-14.
Earlier this year one patient was admitted to a deaf unit as no beds were available anywhere in the country.
Health minister Norman Lamb said out-of-area treatment was a "last resort".
The care and support minister added that it was "unacceptable" if patients had to travel "hundreds of miles" for treatment and said he was determined to drive up standards of care in the NHS.
Leading charities have called the situation scandalous and a disgrace.
One mental health trust spent £345,000 last year placing patients in bed-and-breakfast accommodation in order to free up much-needed beds.
Mental health trusts are having to cope with cuts of more than 1,700 beds over the past two years, and the problems in the system have come to light following a joint investigation between BBC News and the online journal Community Care.
Sending patients out of area can be appropriate for specialist treatments.Figures obtained as part of the investigation, through Freedom of Information requests, show some trusts are managing to maintain, or even reduce, the number of people they send elsewhere.
But the data from 30 of England's 58 mental health trusts shows that overall the number of patients sent out of area has more than doubled between 2011-12 and 2013-14.
The increase comes despite the number of patients being admitted to hospital for mental health problems falling slightly from 167,285 in 2011-12 to 166,654 in 2012-13.
Kent and Sussex are among the worst-affected areas. In Kent 334 patients were sent out of the county last year at a cost of £5m, compared with just 20 people in 2011-12, at a cost of £141,000.
One patient complained she was made to sleep on a mattress on the floor due to the lack of beds. The trust said there was unprecedented demand for beds last year.
In Sussex, the number of patients sent out of area increased from 28 in 2011-12 to 227 last year.Lisa Rodrigues, chief executive of the Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, said rising demand for mental health services and cuts to community services by councils were creating problems.
She said: "Mental health services are a barometer of how the system is operating and if you remove some of the lower levels of support that people rely on to maintain their lives, it's not surprising that they'll present in crisis.
"We are seeing people coming to hospital who are much, much iller when they arrive so we have higher numbers of detained patients but, much more than that, we're seeing people have to stay in hospital for longer."
One patient who knows what it's like to be transported far from home is "Alison" (not her real name).
The 32-year-old from York, who suffers from bipolar disorder, was taken to a hospital in London, 200 miles (320km) away, in the middle of the night when health officials couldn't find a bed for her closer to home.
"I was taken at 3am in an ambulance. It was a bit of a shock to the system," she said.
Difficult to copeThough she praises her treatment, the distance was difficult to cope with.
"With me not being near friends and family I suffered, I had anxiety, I wanted to speak to people and have familiarity around me," she said.
Other patients have had to travel even further, with people being sent from Devon to West Yorkshire (300 miles), and Oxford to Teesside (240 miles).
A London trust - Barnet, Enfield and Haringey - has been reprimanded by the regulator, the Care Quality Commission (CQC), for using seclusion units as bedrooms.
It also started to move patients out of beds and into bed-and-breakfast accommodation. The figures show that 132 people were sent to B&Bs last year.
The trust said the patients were fit to be discharged from hospital but had accommodation problems - however, it admitted it was not ideal for patients.
A board meeting of the Birmingham and Solihull trust in January heard a complaint from a patient who was admitted to a deaf ward despite not being deaf, which she says made her feel stressed and unable to communicate with staff and patients.
An investigation by the trust found this had happened because there were no female beds available in the country. Procedures have now been changed, the trust says, which should ensure it never happens again.
'Fend for themselves'Paul Farmer, chief executive of mental health charity Mind, said: "It is a disgrace that people with mental health problems are being sent miles away from family and friends or being accommodated in inappropriate settings when they are acutely unwell.
"This is the latest in a long line of clear signals that, at least in some parts of the country, NHS mental health services are in crisis. Continued cuts to funding for mental health services are taking a significant toll on the quality and availability of services."
Mark Winstanley, chief executive of Rethink Mental Illness, added: "It's absolutely scandalous that people with serious mental health problems are being treated in such a terrible way.
"Anyone going through a mental health crisis should expect to get help in a therapeutic environment where they can get better.
"The last thing they need is to be shunted to a hospital hundreds of miles away or, even worse, left to fend for themselves in a bed and breakfast."
Have you been affected by any of the issues raised in this story? Email haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk with 'mental health' in the subject.
The map presents population-wide health information for England and Wales.
The researchers at Imperial College London pointed out that it could not be used to see an individual's risk.
It indicated an area's health risk, relative to the average for England and Wales, they stressed.
Twenty-five year study Researchers at Imperial looked at 8,800 wards in England and Wales, each with a population of 6,000 people.They collected data from the Office for National Statistics and from cancer registries for 1985 to 2009.
Data was then mapped alongside region-by-region variations in environmental factors such as air pollution, sunshine and pesticides.
The data was also adjusted for age, deprivation and to take into account small numbers.
Researchers said this was the first tool of its kind showing this level of detail.
Continue reading the main story Lung cancerBreast cancerProstate cancerMalignant melanomaBladder cancerLeukaemiaBrain cancerMesothelioma (a type of cancer that can start in the lungs or abdomen)Liver cancerCoronary heart disease mortalityCOPD mortalityKidney disease mortalityStill birthLow birth weightDr Anna Hansell, from the UK Small Area Health Statistics Unit, led the research.She told the BBC: "We tried to present this so people do not jump to the wrong conclusions."
Dr Hansell said people were "fascinated" by the tool when they trialled it.
She added: "The new thing about it is you can go right down to neighbourhood level - beforehand it has been at a broader scale."
Eight communities in Bridgend and Rhondda Cynon Taff, in Wales, and Leeds, Manchester and the Wirral in England had higher patterns of health risks, Dr Hansell said.
She said within those eight communities none stood out as "doing badly for everything", and that the statistics had not been geared up to rank the areas.
Since the study adjusted for deprivation, Dr Hansell said it raised some "surprising" variations which could be explained by changing smoking rates in the past 25 years.
Meanwhile, 33 wards were identified as having a lower risk of disease, such as parts of London, North Norfolk and Suffolk.
Although the researchers adjusted for deprivation, she said, there must be "some lifestyle factors" going on, to account for the variability.
Environmental factors, such as air pollution, accounted for roughly 5-10% of a person's risk of disease, which was significant in terms of a population, Dr Hansell said.
She said she hoped "really important benefits" could come out of further research using the tool and that it would raise questions about disease patterns.
Maps available on the site Continue reading the main story Prof David Coggon, professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of Southampton, said the atlas provided a "finer level of spatial resolution" than its predecessors.But he said there were "shortcomings" in the research, such as the possible of chance variation and the likelihood of distortion by exposure to non-environmental causes of disease, such as smoking and diet, which are not fully explained by deprivation.
Prof Coggon added: "These unavoidable shortcomings do not invalidate the analyses presented, but they are a reason for caution in interpretation."
He said people should not focus on environmental factors, but instead eat a healthy diet, exercise regularly and avoid smoking, excessive alcohol, and "unnecessarily risky" behaviours such as dangerous driving.
Prof Paul Pharoah, professor of cancer epidemiology at the University of Cambridge, said: "This atlas does not enable anyone to judge their individual absolute risk.
"People should definitely not use this atlas to decide where to live."
He said it would be "wrong to imply" any causal association between any of the environmental exposures and any of the health outcomes described in the atlas.
Prof Pharoah added: "What these data should do is help researchers identify important hypothesis that should be tested using research designs."