The challenge of working in partnership.
· International Stigma conference
2012
Zaragossa Spain
· Personality disorder stakeholders day
2012
Inverness
I am going to talk briefly about working in partnership.
From the perspective of us, as people with mental health problems, as equals with the professionals who care for us.
It would seem easy.
People who try to help us with our difficulties; work alongside us to make services the sort we know will benefit us and those to come along later ….
Surely working together and in partnership is the most sensible thing to do?
There are however barriers of history and culture and perception that can make this a difficult prospect.
Our history is one of oppression.
And the services that have been there to help us have, on occasion, been party to that oppression.
Despite being well meaning, we cannot doubt that in the recent past, treatment was not a passport to a better life.
For many of us mental illness literally was being put aside and discarded.
Finding hope had become an echo that flattened the dreams of a life that we might have cherished as we grew up.
And even today, think of these statistics:
· 85% of people with a serious illness are unemployed.
· 90 % of prisoners have a mental health problem,
· 85% of us say we are isolated and lonely
· 40% of the homeless have a mental illness.
These simple statistics show that even today we tend to live on the margins and tend to demonstrate why we may be angry and alienated.
When you think that our experiences include being detained by the people who we are meant to be partners with or having our children taken from us by agencies we are meant to work alongside; you can see why there is a challenge to this sort of partnership work.
And I am sure similar things can be said by professionals;
Imagine devoting your life to working in a job that is often looked down upon and laughed about and is sometimes poorly paid.
Putting your heart and energy into making a difference.
Working amidst indescribable pain and being given responsibility for taking that pain away.
Being asked to provide some balm and then at the same time being blamed and found fault with.
Working many hours and with a stressed heart and being told that all you are is a paternalistic or maternalistic oppressor.
Does nothing to make you look at this as the work of equals or to feel comfortable with this.
When you are stuck with deadlines and targets and professionality and boundaries and the whole weary culture that can be contained in large institutions
then maybe antagonism and challenge from people like us is unwelcome
and maybe when all you sometimes want is to get up for work and come home to a pleasant evening, the rants and confrontation that you may get from someone such as me put you off the trust and joy of believing that services and life can change dramatically.
So working together is a simple thing layered with a whole cultural history of fear and unease from people who have been immersed in this area of work and who live this sort of life.
Twenty years ago I wrote a letter to the consultant psychiatrist of the ward on which I had been a patient.
We were trying to demonstrate the need for crisis services.
In those days we didn’t think partnership was a possibility.
We wrote the letter assuming it would be put in the bin.
When we were invited to a meeting, we assumed it would be to be told how stupid we were.
On the day of the meeting we spent the morning giggling and getting anxious about what to say.
When the points we made were agreed with, we escaped to a café to laugh in delight and wait for someone to tell us we had got it all wrong.
We joked that we were bound to be detained for our temerity.
The poor psychiatrist must have been bemused and a wee bit despairing about the assumptions we bought into the room.
Nowadays I still talk to psychiatrists and nurses and occupational therapists about what we need and wish for and yet there is a difference.
I call them by their first names. I do not assume they are out to make life as bad as possible.
In fact, I assume that although we may have different ways of achieving it, we have similar aims.
Overcoming those challenges should be a simple matter of overcoming prejudice.
It is about seeing the issues we have in common.
It is about trust.
It is about realising the people we are suspicious of are just as vulnerable and human as we are.
It is remembering that it is exceptionally rare for professionals to set out deliberately to make services or treatments or rights as bad as possible.
It is also exceptionally rare for our behaviour to be deliberately provocative and bizarre and confrontational.
We almost never, as professionals or people with mental health problems try to create inconvenience and mistrust.
We do not try to make people feel bad about themselves.
Or we shouldn’t.
It is about remembering, when we as people with mental health problems, try to improve the world.
it is with the same wonderful motives that professionals have too.
It is realising we are trying to create the same thing.
We have barriers of history and culture.
We have barriers of knowledge and experience.
We have barriers of language and of understanding of impairment.
But these barriers slink away when we pause and talk to each other and alter our perceptions.
To realise that, despite issues of power, we were equals all along.
We had just made an assumption that we weren’t.
Many thanks.
(You can find out more about HUG (action for mental health) at https://www.spiritadvocacy.org.uk/hug)
(Photo: flowers at Ardmore – July 2021)
Opmerkingen