[firemonkey]

Who in their right mind would put "the lunatics in charge of the asylum"? While it may sound counter-intuitive, this approach has a long history. In 1793, the governor of an asylum at Bicêtre in France, Jean-Baptiste Pussin, noted: "When I employed a madman who had just recovered his senses, either to sweep or to assist a servant … his state improved every month, and somewhat later he was totally cured." Pussin spoke from personal experience, he himself having been an inmate at Bicêtre 17 years earlier.

In the last few years, we have started to rediscover that people with personal experience of mental problems can help others recover and keep themselves well.

Across England, mental health services are employing "peer support workers", for whom lived experience of mental health problems is an essential requirement of their job. These "role models of recovery" are able to give hope to people with long-term mental health problems.

Why is this needed? When mental health services work well, they make a real contribution by providing medication, talking therapies and, where appropriate, support to get back into employment. They manage risk for the small proportion of people who pose a risk to others, and for the much larger proportion that are a risk to themselves and intervene to avert crises.

However, mental health services often fail to provide what is arguably the most important ingredient of all: hope. It may sound simple, but for someone who has just been diagnosed with schizophrenia, knowing that many people manage to recover can be what gives them, and their families, the strength to keep going.

Historically, the prevailing view of schizophrenia was that it was a degenerative illness and once diagnosed, you were faced with an inevitable decline. Anxious parents were told to give up hope of any kind of normal life for their once-promising son or daughter; that it was downhill from here on in. We now know this is absolutely not the case, but shifting these entrenched views within the mental health system is an ongoing challenge.

A member of Rethink Mental Illness, the charity I work in partnership with, recently told me how her brother, who has schizophrenia, has effectively been left to waste away in a care home. He sits in a chair all day, staring into space. No attempts are being made to improve his quality of life, no talking therapies, no hope. She feels as though he's been written off by the staff, who barely acknowledge her existence when she visits, let alone discuss ways in which his life might be improved.

This is what can happen when services focus purely on managing illness. Good services prioritise promoting hope for the future, improving links with the wider community and supporting recovery, while being sensitive to the idea that "recovery" is different for each individual.

Peer support workers are good at all of these things. They provide a living challenge to pessimistic expectations. They know from personal experience the value of getting on with life, rather than waiting to get "better". They bring expectations that a life worth living is available, even to people with the most severe mental illnesses.

It is for this reason that the Institute of Psychiatry and Rethink Mental Illness have joined together in a five-year project to promote recovery in mental health services.



http://www.guardian....support-workers

[Universal Credit]

Just a money saving scam flowered up with a bit of juicy rhetoric. I might help someone but that'd be down to time and chance without any formal training...could just as easily make things worse.

[ramboself]

If you can encorage some one to be self sufficient you can make savings on service costs, that to me is the reality of recovery etc, peer support probably you can get people who are willing to work for the min wage you couldn't otherwise get

I had the rethink on drug recovery line pushed like brain washing years ago in a then nsf hoatel, lifes made me cynical

[Universal Credit]

ramboself, on 02 March 2012 - 04:28 PM, said:

If you can encorage some one to be self sufficient you can make savings on service costs, that to me is the reality of recovery etc, peer support probably you can get people who are willing to work for the min wage you couldn't otherwise get

I had the rethink on drug recovery line pushed like brain washing years ago in a then nsf hoatel, lifes made me cynical

Cynical and jaded is what happens if you live to our ages.

[toffee]

Why don't they employ more social workers, nurses, doctors and psychogists with mental health problems and particularly ones who have spent time in hospital???

I'd rather they focused on doing that and reducing stigma in health services than creating tokenistic roles (which i'm sure do do a lot of good but they still make the mentaly ill 'other' which does not create much hope in me).

Many mental health professionals will talk about stigma being reduced, but they still hold onto the belief that a mentally ill person shouldn't be in a position of 'real' responsibility and would balk at the notion of colleagues and bosses with severe mental illness (and sadly so do many service users). Doctors are scared even to admit to depression - the 'common cold' of mental illness.

It is pathetic.

I'd have more faith in these initiatives if they introduced positive discrimination in selection of the 'severely mentally ill' for mental health professional courses and jobs. I believe positive discrimination would be fair as competing 'fairly' on the basis of how much we've done/achieved is indirect discrimination as many of us cannot hope to match the unblemished CV needed for many competitive jobs.

[manic666]

toffee, on 03 March 2012 - 03:43 AM, said:

Why don't they employ more social workers, nurses, doctors and psychogists with mental health problems and particularly ones who have spent time in hospital???

I'd rather they focused on doing that and reducing stigma in health services than creating tokenistic roles (which i'm sure do do a lot of good but they still make the mentaly ill 'other' which does not create much hope in me).

Many mental health professionals will talk about stigma being reduced, but they still hold onto the belief that a mentally ill person shouldn't be in a position of 'real' responsibility and would balk at the notion of colleagues and bosses with severe mental illness (and sadly so do many service users). Doctors are scared even to admit to depression - the 'common cold' of mental illness.

It is pathetic.

I'd have more faith in these initiatives if they introduced positive discrimination in selection of the 'severely mentally ill' for mental health professional courses and jobs. I believe positive discrimination would be fair as competing 'fairly' on the basis of how much we've done/achieved is indirect discrimination as many of us cannot hope to match the unblemished CV needed for many competitive jobs.

i dont think letting a surgeon who had spent some time as a patient in a mental hospital , a good idea to do heart surgery on me. ocourse there are mentally ill doctors but the wont say anything or there job has gone forever. Your in remission not curred, so your still ill, so they treat themself with fake scripts for meds. an the muddle through without killing to many of us , when they work through relaspe.plus a mentally ill person that goes to work in a job that they have been a patient, is a disaster waiting to happen, why remind your self . it ,s forgeting that make you well

[toffee]

If you are in remission then at that point in time you aren't ill just cos you still have the disorder. personally, I'd be far more worried having someone with cardiovascular disease doing surgery on me - and many surgeons continue despite this - than someone with a schizphrenic disorder that is in remission.

[Universal Credit]

Then this will deepen segragation won't it? The ill looking after the ill like in a leper colony? Still someone must be play the plywood violin at the gates to hell I suppose?

[manic666]

toffee, on 05 March 2012 - 10:14 PM, said:

If you are in remission then at that point in time you aren't ill just cos you still have the disorder. personally, I'd be far more worried having someone with cardiovascular disease doing surgery on me - and many surgeons continue despite this - than someone with a schizphrenic disorder that is in remission.

this will never happen im afraid , unless you have forged documents.

[toffee]

I dont understand your comment about forged documents. Plenty of people go into remission and are symptom free for years.

[manic666]

toffee, on 06 March 2012 - 10:05 PM, said:

I dont understand your comment about forged documents. Plenty of people go into remission and are symptom free for years.

because its on your medical records, that you are a SCHIZOPHRENIC not a great C-V

[ramboself]

This language that people can work has little to do with getting people jobs it's about cutting the benefit bill by taking people of the higher rates

Having had the jab i'd be uncomfortable holding someone down

[Universal Credit]

ramboself, on 07 March 2012 - 11:07 AM, said:

This language that people can work has little to do with getting people jobs it's about cutting the benefit bill by taking people of the higher rates

Having had the jab i'd be uncomfortable holding someone down

Yeah, there's no work for those fit and well, or those with a good work record and just lost jobs. That isn't gonna change tommorow and when it eventually does, no doubt on the war-spending of a military budget, we'll still be at the back of the bus like in the previous boom times.

[toffee]

Then use your direct payments to make sure you are better qualified than other people, or have shortage skills, and encourage Paul Jenkins to raise these issues more forcefully with politicians and employers

[ramboself]

I don't know if you mean me but i've been refused direct payments appears i don't fall into the substantial or critical needs bands the top 2 of 4 bands, advocate took it up with parliamentary ombudsman who i felt didn't understand about direct payments for mental health, using direct payments for similart things to you describe

[Universal Credit]

Like everything else it is aimed at physical needs. The bulk of the mental health budget, which is massive, gets eaten up by the latest expensive smarties...very little makes it my way that's for sure.

[manic666]

the reason the benifts are low is because of the rape of the system , I mean i have extencive medical records of mental an phyical illness an can claim the benifits for them. Now someone with no such records, or illness,s can fill in a form an still at the moment claim for the same benifits even though they are perfectly well an sat in the pub, no medical records needed to claim free money. Thats where you extra benifits are going , its got f*** all to do with anything else

[Universal Credit]

manic666, on 09 March 2012 - 06:16 PM, said:

the reason the benifts are low is because of the rape of the system , I mean i have extencive medical records of mental an phyical illness an can claim the benifits for them. Now someone with no such records, or illness,s can fill in a form an still at the moment claim for the same benifits even though they are perfectly well an sat in the pub, no medical records needed to claim free money. Thats where you extra benifits are going , its got f*** all to do with anything else

That's what it says in the Daily Mail but the system is pretty tight in practice. The object of this kind of propoganda is to distract attention from the bankers who are really breaking the system for a profit and half. If you think fifty quid is gonna sink the pound then you have to ask what sixty million will do, or six hundred million or six trillion? But that kind of mathematics escapes the press agenda, but the press are owned by billionaires. If you fall for the line that fiddling a few quid will sink the ship but ignore the billions behind the curtain - where are you?

[manic666]

Spartikus Rex, on 09 March 2012 - 06:22 PM, said:

That's what it says in the Daily Mail but the system is pretty tight in practice. The object of this kind of propoganda is to distract attention from the bankers who are really breaking the system for a profit and half. If you think fifty quid is gonna sink the pound then you have to ask what sixty million will do, or six hundred million or six trillion? But that kind of mathematics escapes the press agenda, but the press are owned by billionaires. If you fall for the line that fiddling a few quid will sink the ship but ignore the billions behind the curtain - where are you?

dont bite the hand that feeds you, bite the hand,s off fake scroungers feeding off you.

[Universal Credit]

manic666, on 09 March 2012 - 06:28 PM, said:

dont bite the hand that feeds you, bite the hand,s off fake scroungers feeding off you.

I don't know? If I had a say half the human race would get their calling cards tommorow all on acount of them being dumbrucks. That's why I haven't got a opinion really. I can trump yours in a second. Good thing I'm not in charge of the show isn't it?