GLASGOW PEER SUPPORT WORKERS
MY RECOVERY JOURNEY AND MY WORK AT THE MENTAL WELFARE COMMISSION FOR SCOTLAND
March 2023
GRAHAM MORGAN
Hello everyone
I am going to talk for about ten to fifteen minutes on my recovery story and the work of the Mental Welfare Commission who I work for and then hopefully we can have a discussion and questions and so on.
First of all my name is Graham Morgan and although I know many people resist diagnosis as a form of identity, I have a diagnosis of schizophrenia and have been on a community based compulsory treatment order for the last 14 years and have had the diagnosis for the last 30 odd years.
I work for the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland as an engagement worker and will talk about that in a bit more detail soon. But as a very brief introduction it is all about protecting and promoting the rights of people like us; those of us with mental health problems, learning disabilities, autistic people and people with dementia.
I will start by being a bit challenging – I don’t like the word ‘recovery’ as I worry that it mixes different concepts that are held by mainstream society and the mental health movement together in an unhealthy way.
Will I get better if that is what we call it? I very much doubt that; this has been going on for forty years now. Will I ever be free of compulsory treatment? Maybe but then if I am, I will stop my medication and that might result in my death but do I have a good life in the presence or absence of symptoms as we see it in the world of mental ill health? Yes, very much so?
At the age of 60 my life is as good as it has ever been; maybe better than it has ever been.
What makes it so?
Well I live with Wendy and James and Charlotte; Dash the dog and Bon Bon and Pumpkin the rabbits. I feel loved; my wider family who once I looked on with suspicion I now really enjoy having in my life. My son, who I haven’t seen for many, many, years wished me a happy birthday in a private message on facebook a couple of weeks ago. Those things are wonderful.
All going well, my house which I lived in in Nairn before going to live with Wendy in Argyll will be sold in the next few weeks and I will be able to pay off her mortgage so if we lose our jobs we will still have somewhere to live.
I have an income and a job I love. I have friends or at least a few. I go to Jeans Bothy Community Wellbeing Hub to write and to read; to do my photography and mingle with people who do not judge me. My two memoirs are selling ok and seem to move some people hugely. I have just started to try to reduce my drinking, which is not good at the moment for my wellbeing, but hopefully will be soon. I eat well, read a lot, walk by the Clyde watching the seals, the oyster catchers and the curlews with Dash the dog; I get squelchy shoes and a windblown face but I love it. For the first time in years I pretty much expect to sleep when I go to bed.
There is little else I could wish for.
Now to start relating this to my work.
I was twenty when I first went into a psychiatric hospital. It was one of the old asylums and I couldn’t have asked for more which sounds very weird. Why? Because it was pretty wretched, with beds right next to each other, noisy nights, holes in the walls, overbearing staff on occasion and pretty abysmal treatment on occasion. But I had lost my way in life at an early age and coming from a privileged background but being desperately unhappy needed purpose and love and friendship.
I found purpose by witnessing the poor treatment of my fellow patients and starting what became my career later on, by speaking out with them to make life better for them and me. I found love by getting involved in a relationship with my key nurse once I was discharged and I found a form of friendship when a fellow patient who had learning disabilities and alcohol issues decided to adopt me as his friend and by extension, a ready source of beer when his dole ran out.
I don’t know if those old hospitals were really as bad as we say they were. I think for some people they were. I knew one man who had spent the last forty years in there and who really wanted to know what the city looked like outside the gates. I heard of a man who was locked alone at the top of a tower in a room on his own because of his violence and how all the nurses were frightened to give him his meals. I heard a fellow patient scream all night because after we patients had stopped him attacking a nurse, a pile of around 6 male nurses had leapt on him when he was no longer being violent. An old man who arrived much the same time as me had had to hold his trousers up with his hands as he was given no belt and died alone and unmourned not long after I left. That friend of mine with learning disabilities – he was taken to the pub in the evenings by the nurses but as soon as he stopped drinking coke and took a drink was discharged to a homeless hostel which consisted of two rooms with just bare floorboards and no beds. These things surprised me and made me indignant.
I volunteered with a Half Way House for young people with mental health problems and then helped set up a drop in centre for young people with mental health problems called ‘McMurphies.’
Doing such things gave me purpose, a reason to get out of bed. They made me feel valued and helped me make friends; they helped me find something I believed in and belonged to.
You will all know much more about peer support than me but I suppose back forty years ago when we hadn’t heard of the word, we were busy with peer support whether that be as volunteers doing sleep overs and providing activity in the Half Way House or by creating, between us, that drop in centre.
Since then my mental health community has been my work and my friendship circle. It is where I feel safe and understood and where I know we tend to share a similar sense of belonging and sometimes shared values.
In the 1990’s I moved to Edinburgh where a group of us started speaking out about our lives and services. We spent a lot of time in smoke filled rooms and noisy pubs and had great ambitions which were partly realised when the mental health workers around us got funding for what became CAPS, to help us have a voice individually and collectively. I became the first worker there. The joy of standing up and being heard; of saying injustice is wrong and we are legitimate and need heard was wonderful.
I then moved up to Highland where I set up HUG (action for mental health) and People First Highland. We grew rapidly and had a major impact; being involved in the reviews of mental health legislation, founding partners of See Me, often in Parliament, doing work in prisons, with young people, with parents whose children had been taken into care. Having a creative voice and a media presence and an international dimension. Those were truly exciting years because we could actually see what we did made a real difference; whether that be in the development of new services or changes in attitudes or increases in awareness or just that sense of belonging and wellbeing we all got by doing stuff together.
During those years I continued to get admitted to hospital and continued to get sectioned but I managed to continue managing our organisation.
The people around me and the power of having a mission and a vision to make a difference were key to my shaky wellbeing but it was only after my marriage fell apart and I lost contact with my son and spent many months in hospital that I began to find some balance in my life.
I met Wendy and in that relationship learnt that you can love as equals and without fear. I also learnt that work is not the be all and end all of everything; that friendship, children, the small things in life are actually much more important than speaking at a conference or writing a report.
I moved to Argyll to be with her and learnt that I became nicer and kinder and happier by working part time. I started work with the Mental Welfare Commission and found even more obvious than I already thought, that most professionals are trying to achieve much the the same as we were in the user movement.
I must admit I do like ideas of partnership and cooperation. I like the thought that organisations and individuals can reach beyond their own narrow interpretations of what they think they should be doing and work to a common cause. I like that in my own personal life and professional life issues of bitterness and blame have diminished in the knowledge that we all make grievous mistakes, myself included, and that that does not make us untouchable.
In the Commission, I still get chances to mix with my peers in my frequent trips around Scotland to meet lived experience groups and although I work for a formal organisation and am paid, hope when I am sitting in a community centre on Mull or in a hotel in Inverness or an arts venue in Arbroath that we all feel that we are engaged in a shared effort to make a difference. On those visits I try to find out the issues people are experiencing and pass them on to practitioners at the Commission to hopefully get acted on. I also consult on whatever they or we think are important matters of the moment so that their voice can be heard in the Commission and further afield.
At the Commission we visit every psychiatric ward regularly and as engagement officers we are frequently part of the team that carries out these visits. Having been a patient I often have a different perspective to that a nurse or social worker might have and can sometimes make a connection with fellow patients when they realise that I know how boring wards can be, or how intrusive it can be to be on constant obs.
The Commission also carries out what we call themed visits looking at the experience of different communities or issues and on these I often meet people with lived experience to inform the visit. Sometimes our visits are about experiences I don’t have such as of eating disorders or forensic care but on others the issues are close to home, either through my own experience or that of people close to me, for instance around homelessness, addictions or BPD.
Some of the stuff I love doing is consulting people such as you on issues that we know will need to be being acted on at a national policy level at some point. So for some years I did a lot of work on how we experience compulsory treatment and how we view it – these consultations had a major effect on the Scott review which recently completed its review of Scottish mental health legislation. Other consultations on care planning or advance statements or seclusion or access to legal advice have helped inform our good practice guidance or other organisations policies and practice.
I give a lot of talks, go to lots of meetings – often nowadays from the comfort of my own bedroom but nothing can replace that feeling when we are sitting down together and can drop the mask and just let the conversation flow, feeling that connection; knowing somehow, maybe in surprising ways, the conversations will one day make a difference to our and other people’s lives.
Thank you
(photo - crocus in cardross feb 23)
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