Robin Johnson continues his excellent series on housing issues, this time exploring the important role that support workers can have in reaching out to and engaging with individuals who would ordinarily be reluctant to put themseves in the hands of conventional care or therapy services.
Jayne MacGregor shares with us her life‐long journey and battle with obsessive compulsive disorder and depression. She describes how religious belief, meditation, psychotherapy and medication have all played key roles in keeping her afloat and how they are essential tools in her survival kit.
Now in its third year, The Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival is fast becoming a significant cultural annual event, which aims to achieve social change through the arts. Through innovative programming of arts events, the Festival explores the relationship between mental health and creativity, celebrates the artistic achievements of people with experience of mental health issues, and promotes positive mental health and well‐being. It aims to promote the rights and recovery of people who experience mental ill health, while exploring mental health and inequalities that affect us all. The multi‐arts Festival focuses on audiences' existing interests in film, theatre, comedy, music, literature and visual arts to tackle stigma and engage people.
There is general consensus that taking up adult learning is good for mental health. For people experiencing mental health difficulties, taking up learning enhances social inclusion. Learning helps people gain new skills, become more employable, meet new people and grow in confidence. It can also be an exhilarating experience that aids the recovery process. So why are so many people who are experiencing mental health difficulties still missing out on learning opportunities?
Beat the Blues is a support group in Stockport providing information and support to anyone who thinks that they may be suffering from postnatal depression. Set up and run by a group of mothers who have lived with postnatal depression, the group offers a range of different activities and an opportunity to talk to others who feel the same. This article describes how the group was developed using a community development approach, and Rose Tyldesley describes her role as a community development worker in facilitating this. Linda Phillips describes how she got involved in group as a committee member, and what the group has meant for her.
A group of African and Caribbean people decided to tell mental health workers and others in east London about their struggles to achieve mental health. They wanted to show that black people with mental health problems are individuals, with different histories and different talents. They wanted to show that it is possible for African and Caribbean service users to rebuild their lives after a mental health crisis and even after years in and out of hospital. In this article, Zhenreenah Muhxinga describes how they produced a book of stories to challenge the familiar assumption that recovery is not an option for black people.
This article describes the National Social Inclusion Programme's Communities of Influence workstream, the premises on which it was founded, the innovative social inclusion practice it proposed, what was learned and how the work will be taken forwards in the future.
Zoe Robinson reports on recent and forthcoming developments within the National Social Inclusion Programme.
As part of their provision for children and adolescents, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM) provides acute and elective inpatient and day patient care for young people aged between 12 and 18 years at the Snowsfields Unit at Guy's Hospital. An important aspect of the unit's work consists of supporting young people to continue their engagement with education, and a curriculum is provided by the Bethlem and Maudsley School that focuses on positive re‐engagement with self, others and, by extension, with mainstream education. There is a strong cross‐curricular emphasis on personal, social, health, emotional literacy and creative education, alongside the consolidation of basic skills for living (literacy, numeracy, ICT and life skills).
I am proud to be known as an expert by experience in recovery from mental distress, but I am also a co‐founder and director of a multi‐award winning, peer‐led charity called Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health. In the 1980s, after experiencing my third breakdown, I was an extremely angry person because of the lack of cross‐sector service provision to assist me in becoming whole again. Thankfully I used my rage to develop, along with my co‐founder Dave Wheat, our Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health services to meet the needs of those in mental distress. Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health provides person‐focused, recovery‐rooted services that aim to promote recovery, enabling people to become contributing members of society again. This is the history of Changes 12 Steps to Mental Health, our achievements and the challenges that we have faced in developing the services that we provide today.
In this article, Sasha Bhat describes a project in Bradford set up to improve mental health services by researching and designing better systems for involving black and minority ethnic (BME) communities in commissioning. Two members of the project, Kulvinder Kaur and Shabana Kauser, describe their reasons for joining, what they got out of it and what they hope will come out of it.
Alex Duffield describes a fascinating project at Bromley Mind to train and support people with lived experience of mental health difficulties ‐ peer support volunteers ‐ to run ‘drop‐in’ sessions at their centres.
Robin Johnson continues his excellent series on housing issues, this time exploring the important role that support workers can have in reaching out to and engaging with individuals who would ordinarily be reluctant to put themseves in the hands of conventional care or therapy services.
Veterans of the user‐survivor movement, Peter Campbell and Andrew Roberts, profile the Survivors' History Group, a network of approximately 100 members across the UK and Ireland, who believe that the history of individual and collective action by service users/survivors is both interesting and important, and worthy of preservation.
Depression interferes with your life; it robs you of joy and can steal your dreams, hopes and aspirations. When it grips hold of your life, it can make you doubt your ability to do all the things you know you can do when you are well, such as your job, maintaining your relationships, or simply having fun.
In the first paper in this short series (Sen et al, 2009), we talked about the importance of having ‘recovery heroes’. There is a grave danger to the whole recovery movement if it is colonised by mental health professionals and not owned by service users themselves (O'Hagan, 2008). This danger can be seen in attempts to conduct randomised controlled trials of ‘recovery interventions’, designed by professionals, who want to bring recovery practice into evidence‐based medicine. If it means anything, recovery is fundamentally an individual process. The recent Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health report (Shepherd et al, 2008), quotes Bill Anthony:‘Recovery … is a deeply personal, unique process of changing one's attitudes … involves the development of new meaning and purpose in one's life …’ (Anthony, 1993)Patricia Deegan also emphasises the person‐centred focus of recovery, ‘… recovery is an attitude, a stance, a way of approaching the day's challenges …’ (Deegan, 1996, p96). The most important evidence, to our minds, is that of individuals who are on the journey of recovery. Recovery heroes are courageous individuals who have made considerable progress along the path that few staff ever have to travel. We would like to introduce you to another one: Peter Chadwick.
In this article we describe Open Arts' achievements during the project's first year of operation and present the first results from an ongoing evaluation being carried out by SE‐SURG (the South Essex Service User Research Group).
The National Day Services Modernisation Network was launched in January 2009 and is a collaboration between the Inclusion Institute (taking on the role previously held by the National Social Inclusion Programme), Mind, Rethink and Richmond Fellowship. The Network came about in recognition that many of those involved in modernising mental health day services were struggling with the same issues, often in isolation, and that there was a need for a forum to discuss and develop approaches to these issues.
Brian Joof, a young man of West African origin who has experienced and overcome long‐term mental health problems, describes his recovery process, during the course of which he has experienced the additional challenges of migration, racism, homelessness, drugs, prison and long‐term unemployment. Brian tells us how he has overcome each of these difficulties in turn to build an increasingly full and satisfying life for himself.
Leeds Survivor Led Crisis Service was set up in 1999 by a group of service users, who had campaigned for five years to develop the service. We were set up to be a place of sanctuary – an alternative to hospital admission and statutory services for people in acute mental health crisis. The service was established, and continues to be governed, managed and staffed by people with direct experience of mental health problems. We have our own unique perspectives on what it feels like to be in crisis, and what helps and doesn't help. We have developed our service based on this knowledge and experience, while responding to the needs articulated by our visitors and callers.
