HUG (action for mental health) as a Peer community and source of Recovery.

HUG (action for mental health) as a Peer community and source of Recovery.

Recovery camp: Ron Coleman and Karen Taylor

June 2015 Dumfries

Hello everyone

Reading speeches should really be done in posh conference suits where people wear suits and take notes but I am afraid I am going to read this one here in a campsite in the woods almost in the fresh air. If I could I would speak off the cuff and try to be charming and relaxed but i am not too good at that.

I don’t know why I need to have a written speech. I think, because I am nervous and want to be sure that I get what I say almost right.

I am writing this speech a day or so before you all set off for this camp in these woods. I hope you have a good time. I’m not having a good time as I write this, in fact although I am glad to be writing this, as it is a distraction, I am finding it hard to concentrate.

The reason for this is because James, my partners four year old, is presently in intensive care and at the back of my mind is the thought that I might get a call I dread more than anything any moment.

I got up at five this morning to drive down to my partners house, I stopped in tesco’s to buy the ingredients for soup, dips and snacks and lots of chocolate and magazines and have been tidying the house and cooking since I arrived here and now I am typing and listening to music and hoping if my partner comes back this evening I will be able to give her comfort and support.

There is nothing surprising about that; we are not quite a family yet. I only see the children every two weeks and am not their dad. I only see my partner every week and we live 200 miles apart and yet in our own way we are a family; a wee community.

And in our wee family we laugh and squabble and help each other out and cherish each other and dream together and feel connected.

Nowadays there are so many different types of family and so many different communities and some of them are good and some of them are toxic.

Ron Coleman has asked me to talk about HUG as a peer community and a source of recovery and so that is what I am going to do.

It is strange to think of HUG as a community and yet many of our active members say that not only is it a community, it is the family they would have chosen if they had had a choice when they were part of their original families .

Hug is a place of belonging and support. It is a place of shared dreams, and shared work, it is a place where we celebrate each other and cherish each other. It is that place where, when we walk through the door, even those people who are wary of hugs reach out to hug their friends.

And yet in the ways of communities and families; people can be damaged by each other and can grow disgruntled and leave with a bitterness in their heart. I will speak about that later.

Many of you will never have heard of HUG. In the words of our funders we are a collective advocacy group that covers Highland Council area, to help people speak out about their lives. We have quarterly monitoring meetings and report according to the principles of the Scottish Independent Advocacy Alliance. When we are monitored which is often, our funders want to find out about our governance and our response to policy and legislation. We report on conflict of interest and our equal opportunities policy. We have a board of directors, finance meetings, volunteer and staff job descriptions, we have grievance policies and complaints policies. We have expenses policies and vulnerable adults policies. We have advisory group meetings, staff meetings, volunteers meetings and team meetings. We have audited accounts and a constitution.

We have a business plan and seek out funding for new work all the time.

I am maybe making assumptions but I imagine that some of you will be groaning already at the thought of being involved in something like HUG. Maybe you will be saying;

“What family ever had a grievance policy?”

So what do we really do?

Let’s move away from words like governance and talk of something else. We set out to change the world. We have numerous ideas about what would make the world a better place for people with mental health problems, some of which you may agree with and some of which you would probably object to.

But that is what we try to do. We act as a voice for anyone who wants to join us in Highland. We speak out on the issues our members say are important to them and consult them on what their views are. At any time we can be preparing reports varying from peer support, to medication to detention to welfare reform. We must have produced about 60 reports over the years.

We challenge stigma. This varies from appearing in the national and local media, to speaking at conferences, to awareness training with professionals, to going into PSE classes, to taking plays around schools or producing exhibitions of art work or performances of poetry or showing one of our numerous dvds.

We have a network of volunteers, who do anything from working on green issues, to acting on welfare reform, to attending committee meetings. They distribute literature, have run our spirituality group and disability group, produce our newsletter, speak in Parliament, work on l.g.b.t.q issues, attend the police community advisory group, provide our awareness training or promote peer support and recovery.

We lobby politicians and officials. We hold consultations and we hold focus groups, we run our twitter account and our facebook page.

We have sub groups to include people who may be less included in the main HUG group, so we have SPEAK, our young people’s group. Live life well; our older peoples project. Hear Me; our group for parents whose children have been taken into care and HUG inside, for people in contact with the justice system.

And that may not interest you either because here we are talking of recovery and peer support. I know little of what recovery is but I would guess we apply some of the personal principles of recovery to our collective action.

Just as recovery seeks to move away from the concentration on impairment so does our work seek to look to the positive in ourselves and those that sometimes try to help us.

We do need to reflect on the negative, on the way things work badly sometimes, but it is helpful to also look towards solutions and not to demean and diminish with the force of our anger.

It is more than helpful for our membership to have activity and purpose that is based on change for the better and which creates real change in numerous different ways than that terrible inward spiral where it becomes so easy to reflect on all that is negative and out of that become more negative and so on and so on.

The real substance of what I think you might want to know about is the sense of HUG as a community where recovery occurs and where we grow and develop.

It is almost hard to talk of this; as an advocacy service we are required not to provide a therapeutic service so if I talk of HUG as a place where we embark on our recovery journey, I get into slightly edgy territory.

First of all, I do not think that we are unique or even that much different to the sense of belonging many people get from the network of drop in centres across Highland.

And secondly, many of our members find the idea of recovery slightly offensive, maybe a rather tired argument that we do not need to get into just now, but I do wonder how enthusiastic our members would be if I were to claim that we were places of recovery.

I asked some of our members what Hug means to them before I came here. It would have been better if some of them had come along with me to tell you themselves but due to some confusion on my part I did not know I was coming along here until recently.

Our members talk of not having to wear the mask, of not wearing an invisibility cloak, of being able to be who they are without fear of discrimination or stigma. They talk about being accepted and valued and that in HUG they can find laughter and mutual support and worth.

I would say that is true for some of us. In HUG we are the best parts of a family and in that family we all have a role and a worth and a value. We give and contribute and treasure each other.

But this is, I would guess, only the truth for about thirty of our members. That small network of friends and colleagues who set out to change the world and in doing so find themselves learning to celebrate themselves and each other.

But HUG has 500 members and we have never set out to find out what HUG is to them. My guess is that most are glad that they know there is an organisation in the Highlands that they can trust will speak up for them and that if ever they or their service need listened to that we are there to turn to.

It is maybe that sense that between us in small ways we are changing the world together and I know that although we only meet some of our members occasionally and only set off to tour the Highlands every three months or so that, generally, we are welcome in the houses, drop ins , church halls and hospitals in which we meet.

And of course among our members we fall out and make up and this is all part of the web and weave of being human. I know some of our more active members set various boundaries, in that there is HUG work and being in the HUG building and there is the peer support we get from HUG work but also there is the close friendship with other HUG members that is clearly identified as friendship and in some ways nothing to do with HUG and which will always have its own tensions as any friendship does.

In a community, people can become unwelcome for many reasons. In the 19 years we have been going we have only barred two people from HUG and both of them are in some fashion still in contact with us.

I suppose it does have to happen sometimes, when the presence of someone appears to damage a number of other people and their actions denies others the chance to participate or have a voice but it is very sad when it happens.

More commonly people leave us because they are moving on, either because they have new things in their lives or because they are shifting out the area. Sometimes people leave because they become disillusioned and sometimes people leave, either because there are not enough things on offer for them or because they are doing too much and become exhausted.

I remember one of our members reflecting on whether HUG was good for her and listening to her conclusion that that is not the point, that when we want to change the world we are very rarely looking to improve our wellbeing. Instead we are trying to contribute and change and make things more just.

A large part of me thinks that when you have a purpose and a cause, even when it is intensely painful to you, that this is part of growing and developing and a part of recovery.

Hug is a place of recovery. It is a place where people speak out and take risks by doing so. It is where people learn to regain trust. It is where people speak in public for the first time, appear in the media, write their very first story, cook their first meal in company, eat in company. It is where people; out of their wish for a better world, will sit in the same room as other people and speak a couple of sentences when their body is screaming at them to run away.

Often HUG is place of laughter and sharing.

But HUG is now a large organisation for the type of organisation we are. we have 7 part time staff. We have outcomes to meet and money to account for; so it was no surprise to me recently, when some of our members said

“Are we growing too large and too quickly? Are we now in a space where our obligations to our staff and our members both ethically and legally, can act against that very sense of community and belonging in which community can flourish?”

I do not know the answer to that. In a group like HUG we do need some structure. Without clear values and ways of holding each other to account we could rapidly implode. Any group with strong personalities and a subject where emotion is high is inevitably vulnerable.

Such groups can be subject to the strongest and most passionate voice at the expense of the quieter and more reserved members .

In some ways I see HUG as a hierarchy run on co- operative lines which sounds really strange. We preach equality and involvement and participation but we reserve the structure we are a part of, to ensure as far as we can, that sense of safety and security that means that when people get ill or exhausted, that they can retreat until they can face us again.

That means that when people are doing too much, they can collapse quietly and ask someone to take over.

That means that when there is tension and difficulty we have workers, advisory groups and boards of directors to intervene and solve issues that in less organised groups might become insurmountable.

In fifteen minutes I cannot go into the structure or how we set up HUG except to repeat the bit that I said at the beginning.

We started off very enthusiastic and idealistic and along the way we have developed all the attributes and procedures that are needed to keep any publicly funded organisation ethical and efficient and organised about what it needs to do.

Like I said, too much organisation, too many job descriptions can make an organisation like ours stale and clinical. Can work against that sense of belonging we need. But for us, what we have, seems, at the moment, to work.

That does not mean that we are a model for peer communities. There are so many ways of setting up a establishing groups such as HUG or those more overtly about recovery rather than voice.

I am going to finish on a personal note because this workshop is about personal recovery journeys.

I started as an activist in the service user movement and was the first director of McMurphys: Britain’s first user run drop in for young people established at the same time as Survivors Speak Out, thirty years ago.

At that time my views about psychiatry were completely different to how they are nowadays. I had great antipathy to professionals of any sort and believed absolutely that everything should be done by and run by service users.

But the thing I had then, which I still have now, even though, at that stage almost no one had heard of the idea of recovery, was the knowledge that between us we can grow and change and delight in the world by doing things together. and by respecting each other whatever our beliefs or background.

For me my journey to well being has been a long struggle and many people would say my mental illness or whatever we want to call it is much, much, worse in the last ten years than it ever was before but my wellbeing:

My wellbeing has come on in leaps and bounds. From someone who spoke so quietly no one could hear him. Who was filled with anger and unable to communicate and lost in a world that seemed pointless, I am now someone who, for the first time really, really, wants to live and seeks those things that bring brightness and joy into mine and other people’s lives.

The ingredients for that:

· Well; finding a purpose and a belief through the user movement

· Learning to trust and be vulnerable through meeting other people with mental health problems

· Having a job that has given me an income that means that my life is so much easier to run than it is for so many people who live on the dole.

· Doing a job which people praise me for and which makes me think that I have something to contribute and have skills to offer.

But more than that it is the bits of my life that did not come through activism.

· It is walking along rivers and beaches and in the hills.

· It is the experience I had of being part of a family; of being a dad for a while.

· It is having friends.

· It is cooking for friends and babysitting for friends and going for coffee with friends.

· It is writing and music.

· And more than anything it is being in love with Wendy and knowing that when I reach home tonight. I will be back with my love and her wee children and knowing that while James was on the verge of death I was, in little ways, able to make life for my sort of family, my tiny, tiny, community slightly better.

· Recovery, is for me, picking up my phone and looking at photos of James and Charlotte and Wendy coming down a slide in an abandoned playground on the island of Luing two weeks ago.

Seeing those smiles makes me more happy and content than I dreamed was possible.

Thank you.

for more information about HUG (action for mental health) visit: https://www.spiritadvocacy.org.uk/hug

(Photo:Trees on the Fairy Trail at Luss. 10 2020)