Every room belongs to someone. The space between them belongs to no one.

There is a story published by Wij zijn MIND, and the writer gave it the only title it could honestly have: the maze that "the GGZ" is called. The person waits three months for an intake. The intake decides they are not in the right place. So they are sent onward, except onward needs a fresh referral, which means back to the GP, which means another waiting list. They reach a specialist at last, and the specialist says, gently, that they would really be better helped at a trauma centre. Which is, of course, somewhere else. So they begin again. Read it as one person walking a loop, and you feel the exhaustion of it. Read it as a diagram, and you notice something colder. At no point in the whole circuit was there a single person whose job it was to make sure she arrived anywhere.

This is the part we almost never name, because it has no owner and so nothing on a chart records it. We talk about the waiting list as if it were one queue. It is not. It is a series of queues, each in front of a different door, and between the doors there is a stretch of nobody's-land that the person crosses alone every time. The handover is treated as a referral sent and received, a line on a form. But what is it really, for the person living it? It is a restart. The work of being known begins again from zero in each new room, and the room you just left has already let go of your hand. Who carries the wait? Who answers when she calls? Who notices if she stops calling? Nobody, because the wait happens in the space no room is responsible for.

Nobody agreed who holds you while you wait

So the obvious question is: whose job is it to hold the person between the rooms? You would expect an answer. There isn't one. When the Inspectorate looked directly at this seam, it found that care providers had made insufficient agreements about who is responsible for which care when a client is on a waiting list (Inspectie Gezondheidszorg en Jeugd, 2023). Sit with that for a second. It is not that the agreement was bad. It is that the agreement was never made. The patient is not lost because someone dropped them. The patient is lost because, in the space between two providers, there was no one assigned to be holding on in the first place.

And that is not an oversight by tired people. It is built in. The State's own 2025 IBO, the one titled Uit balans, reached a conclusion that is rare for a government report to put so plainly: the system, in its current form, is onhoudbaar (Interdepartementaal Beleidsonderzoek, 2025). One of the core causes it names is versnippering, fragmentation. The care for a single human being is split across separate laws, the Zvw, the Wmo, the Wlz, the Jeugdwet, and those laws, the report notes, carry different mensbeelden, different ideas of what the person in front of you even is. So when one law's room hands you to another law's room, the two do not really line up. The gap you fall into is not a pothole. It is the seam where two systems that were never designed to meet are pressed against each other and told to cooperate.

The GP becomes the holding pen, and it is not their room either

Meanwhile there is one fixed point in all of this, one room the patient can always get back to: the GP. And here the maze does something quietly cruel. It turns the family doctor, who has no mandate to provide mental health treatment, into the place where everyone waits. The numbers are stark. In a 2025 survey by the GP association, 93% of GPs reported they experience little or no ability to refer to specialist mental health care, and 67% said the same for basis-GGZ (Landelijke Huisartsen Vereniging, 2025). When you cannot send someone on, you keep them. So GPs now spend, on average, around 3.7 hours a week, close to half a working day, on mental health bridge care that was never theirs to give. And patients, the same survey records, are sent back from specialist care zonder enig overleg, without any consultation at all. The referral comes back like an undelivered letter, no note attached, and the GP is left holding a person they are not equipped to hold.

Why does it happen this way? Because each room is funded, contracted, and governed on its own, and is accountable only for what happens inside it. Not because anyone is callous. What happens between rooms is accountable to no one, because between rooms there is no room. The patient experiences this as personal abandonment, the sense that the system filed them and walked away. The documents show something less personal and, in a way, worse: there was never a person to walk away in the first place. The abandonment is structural. It is what a system produces when ownership stops at every threshold.

So the real question is not how to make any single door open faster. It is harder than that, and quieter. When the person has to cross all that nobody's-land, what travels with them? Right now, almost nothing. The referral letter goes ahead, thin and clinical. The person themselves arrives depleted, having been a stranger four times over. The one thing that could carry across the gap, the thread of who they are and what they have already said, is the thing the system has no mechanism to carry.

This is the gap where Freudche sits, and it is honest to say it sits in only a corner of it. The first part is The Tussen, the in-between: a small piece of gentle company that keeps the patient connected across the gap, so the wait is not simply empty time in which the thread goes slack and the person quietly disappears. The second part is a gentle handover, so that when the room does change, some continuity travels into the next one instead of resetting to zero. But let me be plain about what this is and is not. A tool that lives with one clinician cannot reassign responsibility between four laws. It cannot shorten the queue, and it cannot stitch the versnippering the State itself calls onhoudbaar. What it can do is smaller and real: keep the thread of the person warm across one gap, so they are not reduced to nothing every time a door closes behind them.

The maze is not bad luck, and it is not any single clinician's failing. It is what happens when every room belongs to someone, and the space between the rooms belongs to no one. If we cannot yet give the person an owner for the whole journey, the least we can do is make sure that, in the dark stretch between two doors, the thread of who they are does not have to be dropped.

Researched by Freudche.