Newsletter No.9
The
Queen's Golden |
Welcome to Issue No. 9 of "The Separatist", Wokingham & West Berkshire Mental Health Association's newsletter. In this issue we are featuring an article by the founder of our organisation - our president Pam Jenkinson.
The article was written by Pam for the Mental Health Review - The Journal of the Centre for Mental Health Services Development England (CMHSDE) and provides great insight into the ideals and philiosophy of the Wokingham Crisis House.
Pam was invited to write this article by Elizabeth Parker, the Editor of the Journal, as a result of Wokingham Mind (as we were then) being presented with the Queen's Golden Jubillee award in July 2003.
The Wokingham & West Berkshire Mind Crisis House (now Wokingham & West Berkshire Mental Health Association Crisis House)
Perceived at one level, the Wokingham Mind crisis house is the simplest of projects – both in conception and in reality. Wokingham & West Berkshire Mind was formed in July 1988 by a group of mental health service users and informal carers who were only too well aware of the local paucity of mental health services. The Idea was to fill this gap with things that service users and carers actually needed. Identified as priorities were a drop-in centre, a befriending scheme and crisis beds. The service users had been on the receiving end of psychiatric oppression and the informal carers had had their needs ignored by mental health professionals. We therefore decided from the beginning that professionals would be banned. Thus we ensured that we were and always would be a user run organisation. We sought affiliation to MIND because their stated aims and values were the same as ours and because we valued membership of the national mental health movement.
Our first year’s existence was devoted entirely to the political and the philosophical. We worked out what we were and what we were not before we put any services in place and a lot of our subsequent success is due to the clarity of vision established in those early days. A year later in June 1989 we established a weekly drop-in centre in the heart of the Wokingham community. We soon had a regular attendance of thirty mental health service users and carers from whom a successful befriending scheme was derived. The hall cost £5 per morning. We passed the plate round to raise this rent and also started our own modest fund raising events.
We heard that a house, Station House, Wokingham, was going to be made available to us through rumours on the grape-vine. This house had been the headquarters of the local mental health team which was moving to Wokingham Hospital. However, no meeting was arranged with us to discuss on what basis we were to take possession of this house. Firstly, the proposed date for moving was Christmas 1989. We were of course not ready, but we needn’t have worried. The grinding of bureaucracy was predictably slow, and we eventually got the keys to Station House at Easter 1991.
I have no doubt that social services had an agenda for our development once we moved into Station House, but it was never discussed with us. At our own monthly committee meetings we had already decided to set up Station House as a crisis house as soon as we moved in. We were ready now, having established a flourishing drop-in and befriending scheme from whom crisis volunteers could be drawn. The only discussion about our occupation of Station House took place with the property department of the now defunct Berkshire County Council. They prepared a rent-free lease on two conditions. Firstly, that we should allow a small group of service users who had attended social services' groups to continue coming to our drop-in and, secondly, that we should allow the Wokingham Volunteer Centre to continue using the premises until they found an alternative venue.
Moving into Station House on Tuesday 2nd April 1991, we cleaned, decorated and furnished it and immediately opened our first, and at that time the only, crisis sanctuary. A further crisis sanctuary was set up when the Volunteer Centre moved out in April 1993, a third in October 2000, and a fourth (short term crisis bed) in April 2003. It is a service that has evolved gradually with us acquiring crisis skills and gaining confidence as we go along. The concept is simple. Home-spun, as Mother made it.
You have a little old house in the heart of the community opposite Wokingham Railway station. It is within minutes’ walk of all essential services – doctors' surgeries, hospital, chemists, shops, job centre, housing department, and statutory mental health services. Inside, the furnishings (provided free of charge by the local community) are cosy and homelike. The house consists of four bedrooms with en suites, two kitchens (one for the drop-in centre and one for the guests), a toilet separate from the en suites for the drop-in centre, a small reception lounge, a large lounge and a library with internet access. One of the kitchens incorporates laundry facilities and the other has both a conventional cooker and a microwave.
Stays in the crisis house, that vary in length from one night to one year, are free. Guests are given the house keys and are free to come and go as they please – provided that they abide by our rules which are as follows:
- No abuse of alcohol
- No abuse of dugs
- No smoking in the house
- No stealing
- No violence
- No sexual harassment
- No racial harassment
- No abuse of the premises
- No interference with the peaceful enjoyment of others
- No intervention by professionals.
The most important feature of the crisis house is its asylum function – long accepted as being the essential ingredient in any successful mental health service and sadly lacking in local mental health services. Outside Wokingham is a thrusting, rushing, rich and stressful 21st century town. Inside, Station House is quiet, Victorian, slow and crumbling. The pace is incredibly slow. The walls are thick. The world is shut out. The human resources available to guests consist of company in the drop-in centre if they wish this, befriending, and overnight crisis cover in absolute crisis. Befrienders and crisis workers are always of the same sex as guests. Additional services are a mental health library with internet access, a minibus with a team of drivers, and a holiday caravan by the seaside for breaks right away from Wokingham. Both the minibus (1994) and the holiday caravan (1997) were service user initiatives and the users also raised all the money to fund them.
It is small-scale, it is simple, it works well and meets the identified needs of service users and carers. We accept guests with all psychiatric diagnoses. Our rules exclude a minority whose behaviour requires constant supervision, but a majority of users do not require heavy intervention and the levels of support that we offer meet their needs exactly. So you would imagine that all would be plain sailing. Not so!
The main stream mental health services are more about power than about service and we, as a radical, separatist organisation, are completely free from this power and oppression. Over our fifteen years of existence strenuous efforts have been made by the psychiatric establishment to undermine damage and destroy us. All have failed.
Because we never go to meetings nor get involved in the fruitless political and power struggles that are always going on in 'partnership' schemes, all our energy can be expended in serving our users. Thousands of people have used our drop-in centre over the years and some two hundred have stayed as guests in the crisis house. We have a very high success rate. Large numbers of our users recover and return to employment and successful relationships. A lot of our work involves settling mentally ill people independently in the local community and this also has proved remarkably successful. We deal with a broad range of diagnoses – depression, schizophrenia, bi-polar and obsessional disorders, and anxiety conditions, as well as depressive reactions to job loss and relationship breakdown. In this thrusting 21st century, people need time, space and asylum to resolve their personal crisis in peace. This is what we provide. All our workers are either service users or informal carers so they bring the relevant experience and insight to their work. They don’t need 'training which is a professional concept, but we do, of course, have a very good library with internet access and thus readily available information, and less experienced volunteers always have the support of the long-servers.
I never seek communication with the mainstream psychiatric establishment. I don’t believe in psychiatry, nor social work. I accept the fact that a tiny minority of individuals need to be removed from society and placed under restraint. I doubt that this justifies the huge self-serving, monolithic institution that is the statutory mental heath service. In my opinion a majority of people with mental health problems would be better served by small, voluntary self-help initiatives, like the Wokingham and West Berkshire Mind crisis house. We provide the asylum, support and information that most service users need. We have an excellent record in helping people to free themselves from unhealthy, abusive and unliveable situations and to be restored to happier, more useful and more successful lives.
The mainstream services hate us and this hatred has expressed itself in an ongoing and concentrated campaign of harassment that has lasted as long as we have. Because I rarely speak to them, a lot of what I say is based upon what I suspect and surmise rather than on what I know as fact. Nevertheless my surmises and suspicions have proved amazingly accurate over the years.
In July 1991 an indignant social worker arrived at the crisis house to contend our statement that professionals were banned from our association. I found our conversation interesting, though fruitless. It was clear from the outset that we could not really communicate because we were not arguing from the same belief base. He assumed that as a professional social worker he must know better than us. We as service users must be stupid. Not believing in social work, I do not consider that any social worker can have anything of value to offer. I believe in self-help, so I assume self-help initiatives to be valuable and useful. He believed that it was dangerous for untrained people to take on the support of mentally ill people in crisis. Facts disprove his thesis. Plenty of 'trained' mental health workers have failed to handle the mentally ill safely.
I do not believe that a social worker or any other mental health professional has anything to offer people in a mental health crisis. Even the medical professionals can only offer drugs and we are just as capable as the social worker of calling an ambulance. We even know the number to call. It is 999.
I also suspect that we have insights that the mental health professionals do not share. When the visitor from Mars, the objective onlooker, looks at our crisis house he sees what is really there – a simple humble little project run by a small group of ordinary people of good will.
Analogies are easily made with other areas of social welfare. Beside the well resourced secondary school staffed with professional teachers strenuously delivering the national curriculum, nestles the small wooden scout hut with its leaky roof and inadequate heating. Here boys have tremendous fun learning to cook sausages and tie knots. They also learn invaluable social skills that stand them in good stead for life – it’s very valuable, but it is small-scale and humble. If the head of the large secondary school notices it at all, he smiles beneficently upon it. He does not feel threatened. In the busy high-tech NHS hospital the surgeons with their highly skilled teams of nurses and therapists work through their lists of operations. Down the corridor the jolly team of women from the League of Friends serve tea and cakes to patients visitors in their humble little canteen. The WRVS volunteer wheels her trolley of books around the wards. The neurosurgeon, if he thinks about them at all, smiles beneficently. He doesn’t feel inclined to usurp Mrs Smith’s tea-making operation, nor quarrel with Mrs Brown for having too many Mills & Boon books on her trolley.
By contrast, at the Wokingham Mind crisis house I have seen reactions as widely diverse as ecstasy (from visiting service users) to wild rage (from a visiting health authority official). I have seen frustrated fury (from a director of social services), and controlled anger (from a head of adult services). Bearing in mind that such people are only allowed onto the premises on our official open days, the reactions are startling. Why do we make them so angry? The answer is that whereas mainstream education and physical medicine genuinely have expertise to offer, the psychiatric system is solely about power. They can have no power over us because they are banned in our constitution. Nevertheless, continuously from 1991 to 2001 they continued to try to infiltrate.
They want control of voluntary organisations for three main reasons. Firstly, it is about power, pure and simple. In their mind set there is no point in acquiring diplomas if at the end of it all they cannot lord it over those who have not acquired those pieces of paper. Colonising voluntary organisations also gives an opportunity to people who haven’t climbed the managerial ladder in social services to wield a bit of power otherwise denied them.
Secondly it is about money and resources. A registered charity has access to sources of money denied to statutory bodies. If social services could masquerade behind the Mind face they could lay hands on this money. Also they would acquire plentiful free labour in the form of Mind volunteers - people who will volunteer to work for charity but who would not volunteer to work for social services.
Thirdly it is about shelving responsibility. If social services provide a Mind group with premises and minimal funding they can lever themselves into all the powerful positions on the management committee and call the shots as to who uses the services. They would create a convenient dumping ground for difficult clients. It is not just me who is aware of this danger of 'dumping' if the self-help group loses control of its resources. When John Mahoney, author of the National Service Framework, no less, visited for the ten year anniversary of the crisis house, he referred to this possibility if we ever changed our separatist stance.
When in July 1991 we told the social worker that he and his colleagues were banned, he held a meeting. No doubt the social services agenda was that Wokingham Mind, having existed for nearly three years and having established a useful pool of befrienders and other volunteers, could now be brought into local authority premises, be given minimal funding, and could be colonised by social services to be used for what they wanted us to be.
Two possibilities were discussed. Either turn Mind out of the house and refuse to fund them - not such a good idea because then you are back to square one. Or, leave them to have a suicide and within weeks they will be crawling on their knees to social services begging for their professional help – in which case the colonisation process would only have been delayed by a few weeks. Thirteen years later, they are still waiting.
Wokingham Mind actually waited for some time after that initial visit from the social worker for the next attempt at takeover. Bureaucracies are very inefficient and because our work went from strength to strength and without disaster time passed unnoticed. It was in March 1996 that the next strenuous attempt to undermine us occurred. The new head of the local mental health team teamed up with a local consultant psychiatrist and the head of the local mental health forum to get something done about Wokingham Mind. After five years we had established an extremely good relationship with the local community and were by now in any case much harder to undermine. Even today I remain amazed at the unutterable nerve and arrogance of that consultant psychiatrist. The thrust of his complaint to National Mind was that since I was elected president of Wokingham Mind and since he didn’t agree with the way that we operated, he would welcome their views on how to go about influencing things. National Mind responded by giving us two good practice awards, one for setting up a marvellous crisis house and one for running community care on a shoestring. nGood for them. This ploy having failed, five solid years of continued harassment followed, mainly in the form of trumped up complaints – some anonymous and one from someone with a falsified name of whom we had never heard. In the end they shot themselves in the foot, basically they had left it too late. They had missed the bus. They are inefficient bureaucrats, we had outwitted them.
By the year 2001, in addition to the Mind awards, we had acquired four civic awards from the local community, a high commendation from the Department of Health, certificates of appreciation from Breakthrough and St John Ambulance and a National Lottery award. Trying to prove that there was something wrong with us wasn’t working. Another tack must be tried.
Our Mind peer review took place in January 2000. We were surprised by the negative evaluation and the peer reviewers' openly expressed wish for us to work in partnership with the statutory services. We pointed out that this was prohibited by our constitution which would only change if our members wished it to change. It has been a matter of interest to me how these people persist. They are so used to the professionals calling the shots and having their own way that they just cannot conceive that the service users have got the power and are keeping it. We are never letting go. The peer reviewers considered that our risk assessments must be deficient because we excluded professionals. This view was expressed despite the clear evidence of our immaculate risk-record.
Interestingly, the peer reviewer’s message wasn’t really consistent. We were left unsure whether we were supposed to work with statutory services because we needed their expertise or, conversely, because they were bad and so needed our influence to change for the better. Either way, it was academic, since we refused to change our political stance. As a result of the peer review National Mind worked on policies with us but did not seek to change our political position and we were duly re-affiliated.
The next ploy was the proposed formation of Berkshire Mind by another local Mind Association that worked in partnership with the statutory services with the offered promise that in doing so it would not interfere with us. We refused this kind offer on the basis that the formation of the proposed Berkshire Mind would make Wokingham Mind redundant overnight since no funder would duplicate funding. It was at this time though that we changed our name to Wokingham & West Berkshire Mind in order to make squeezing us out of existence less of a possibility.
To my knowledge no further plots to undermine us have been hatched since 2001, and our winning of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Award in 2003 is the final seal on our success. So what of the future? Our workforce of excellent workers in all our areas of service is remarkably stable with a healthy mix of long-servers and new blood, but I am very much a king-pin – especially when it comes to sniffing out political plots!
My only concern is keeping the professional psychiatric establishment out if I were unable to continue. My colleagues say that they understand, but are they really aware of the strength and persistence of the enemy? The campaign against us has been sustained and it also has been united – with social workers, psychiatrists, housing workers and even 'got at' users and carers all joining in. Combating this is very hard. One has to be strong and determined and well versed in the art of avoidance. If one never responds to letters, never attends meetings, never sees or speaks to them, a platform for changing anything is difficult to achieve. My only doubt is that my colleagues would not cold-shoulder statutory services in this way. So I see a need to continue to protect our services, though purely as services they could run very well without my personal involvement.
Wokingham Mind is not isolated. It has lined itself up with the traditional voluntary sector which has a long established and honourable history of public service. We intend to keep it that way.
Pam Jenkinson
President
Read Back issues of the Separatist
If you have any contributions of suggestions for a future issue of our newsletter, "The Separatist" you can e-mail them to mailbox@wokinghammentalhealth.org.uk or send them to our address which can be found on the Contact page.
|
Registered charity number 1043426 |