The business case for mental health awareness is evidenced by the increasing numbers of employers who are commissioning mental health awareness trainings for their workforce. Employers want trainings which enable their staff to understand more about common mental health conditions. Understanding mental health means that staff can work better with clients and customers. It also allows staff to feel less isolated about personal issues around health and well-being.
Mental health awareness provides the opportunity for employers and employees to find out more about the law as it relates to employment and mental health.
Enlightened employers will seek to develop a workforce team which is happy rather than unhappy, fulfilled rather than excluded. Courses such as MHFA (Mental Health First Aid) show that attendees often feel that one of the benefits of the training in that it allows for a safe space. A safe space where individuals can share feelings about their personal well-being in addition to learning about the broader aspects of mental health conditions and the appropriate interventions.
In addition to mental health, it makes solid sense for businesses to incorporate awareness of social inclusion and mainstream. Returning to or accessing mainstream living is now a key part of the care pathway for those diagnosed with 'severe and enduring' mental health diagnoses. It is equally important for people who may be experiencing conditions such as anxiety, phobia or stress at work.
Both groups - those in primary and secondary care - are being signposted to mainstream life rather than to special settings as a central plank of the recovery process. The implications for any service provider - and that includes businesses - are crucial. Businesses and services are at the receiving end of mainstream.
Clients in recovery are choosing to access their personal goals through a diverse range of outlets. These could range from faith venues to volunteer bureaus, from retail outlets to sports centres, from recording studios to adult education colleges, from libraries to personal counselors, from training venues to department stores.
For businesses, it's not just one in four of their staff who may be experiencing mental health challenges, it's also one in four of their clients, customers and service consumers. Mental health challenges will also have an impact on one in three families. Disclosed or undisclosed, it's clear that mental health and well-being lie at the heart of our transactions and interactions.
Showing posts with label inclusion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inclusion. Show all posts
Friday, 7 January 2011
Tuesday, 21 December 2010
Mental Health 2010 - Review of the Year 2010 part II
Questions
What was the mental health scene like in 2010 for those at the grittier end of the stick? What was 2010 like for people in secondary care? For people under community mental health teams?
Was there more recovery in 2010? Were people in secondary care able to access mainstream more in 2010? Were they less doomed to what Dr. Pat Deegan calls 'a career in mental health'?
Did people with severe and enduring mental health conditions receive enough support from services? Did they receive the right support? Did the support help them or hinder them?
Some answers
Throughout 2010, statutory and voluntary services responded to the health challenge of independence and mainstream in several key ways. Firstly, mental health teams set up some important initiatives. These were geared towards client independence and recovery. Many predominantly service-user led.
Recovery University in the south-west London borough of Merton enables secondary care clients to access a wide spectrum of trainings and skillsets. These include preparing for work, independence and life skills, confidence building, anger management and many more. Recovery University also trains service users as trainers for forthcoming courses.
Other community initiatives are also up and running, including wellbeing programmes and access to psychological therapies. However, pyschological therapies in non-clinical settings are still not available should you happen to have a severe and enduring mental health condition.
Training the trainers often draws upon experiences and qualifications which service users have already gained within their life journeys. Mainstream groups have also utilised service user skills as part of their own training programmes in areas such as visual arts, music and creative writing. This has taken the recovery university one stage further, providing paid employment and access to mainstream.
Statutory services continued to have success in keeping people out of hospital or limiting hospital stays to a minimum. The downside of this is that more and more people are being discharged from statutory services altogether. In 2011 this will inevitably result in more pressure on GP services, as it is these practitioners who will become responsible under the latest government directives.
The rolling-out of the personalisation programme should mean more access to direct payments for many clients under mental health care plans. It should also mean more and more creative uses of direct payments, as DP is being promoted for any activity or outcome that a client deems relevant to his or her recovery. The Personal Stories videos on the NMHDU site bears witness to some of these outcomes. With more and more people being discharged from mental health services, it is crucial that personalisation is a success in the new year.
Thursday, 26 August 2010
Rachel Perkins Guardian interview August 25th 2010
The phrase "going against the grain" could have been invented for Rachel Perkins. Bring up any contemporary issue surrounding mental health and, chances are, the Mind Champion of the Year will come back with a question about why a particular approach is being taken and then advocate for an alternative.
State benefits, a hot topic, is a case in point. As someone who describes herself as "a child of old Labour", Perkins appears slightly uncomfortable that her views on benefits are in some ways in line with those of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government. She says she is "torn" by some Conservative plans, such as caps on housing benefit, yet is in agreement with the proposal for "tapering" benefit payments so that people are incentivised to work. "So that every hour that someone works counts," she says.
Equal citizens
She goes on to argue that the focus by some campaigners on defending entitlement to benefits can reinforce the perception that people with mental health difficulties need to be cared for, rather than being thought of as equal citizens. "Instead of talking about the right to work, we are now talking about the right to benefits. I don't think that's terribly healthy," she says.
"Every human being gains their self-worth from being able to contribute to their communities – and let's face it, the most socially sanctioned way to do that is with work."
Perkins, a clinical psychologist, is probably best known for her impressive efforts to get people with mental health problems back into work, and has spearheaded employment programmes at South West London and St George's mental health trust.
Civil rights is at the core of what Perkins advocates, and she raises the topic frequently. Discussions around mental illness should resemble those around physical disability, she says, where the emphasis has been successfully rooted not on impairment but in a "rights-based agenda". In part, her inspiration heralds from a strand of mental health advocacy in the US that promotes a "peer support" approach to recovery and firmly places mental health in the realm of a broader rights agenda.
The difficulty for mental health campaigners in Britain, she suggests, is that they can end up ghettoised when they should be tapping into wide-ranging issues around exclusion. Equally, too many of the messages put out about mental illness are couched in negative terms, she claims. "The mental health movement has spent so long looking inwards at the sort of services people get, not better lives. One of the things I really hated about the mental health world was its aura of doom and gloom. It was always, 'You can't do anything because of stigma and prejudice.' [The] image of possibility often gets lost in the conversation about stigma. I'm not some romantic, but [change] is possible."
In particular, Perkins gives short shrift to anti-stigma campaigns, which have attracted substantial funding in recent years. "I don't have any evidence that they [work]. I prefer not to use the term stigma, because it attaches to the person. We don't talk about the stigma of race. We talk about racism. The problem with anti-stigma campaigns is that they identify the class of people by their impairment," she says. "I want to see some empirical data [that they help people to get] a home and a job. The bottom line [is] I want to change behaviour."
Discrimination
As her long career in the NHS nears its end, one of the themes that Perkins, 55, intends to persevere with is challenging the expectations of the state and employers when it comes to getting people into work and keeping them there. Mental health awareness training is not the answer to discrimination, she insists, adding that it is wrongheaded to demand that employers do the "heavy lifting" for people with mental health problems in the workplace when the state should do more.
When asked in 2009 by the last government to head a review into how to support more people with mental health problems into work, for example, Perkins proposed that employers be given financial compensation by the state to cover some of the cost of long periods of health-related absence.
The ability to work was vital to how Perkins dealt with her own mental health difficulties, which manifested in the early 1990s. But her ambition goes beyond getting people jobs. She wants a transformation in how mental health is perceived. "We've got to look at civil rights in the context of mental health and citizenship, rather than, 'You are a poor unfortunate.' That kind of thing is a hiding to more discrimination."
Spitting people out
Perkins's career path offers some insight into how her views have evolved. She considered going into academia after finishing her PhD but quickly came to the conclusion that research was dull. She applied to train as a clinical psychologist only to find herself rejected as someone who would "wilt" outside the confines of a university. Undeterred, she applied for and got a job as assistant psychologist at Broadmoor, the high security psychiatric institution.
The experience reaffirmed what she instinctively felt: "I've always been concerned about the way our society is very good at spitting people out at the bottom. That's always bothered me."
Clinical training followed, as well as several other jobs, including stints in "the old state bins", the large Victorian asylums that once warehoused patients. Perkins attributes her belief that work is the best route to a better life to those early experiences. She describes one institution she helped close in 1990: "There were 40 beds to a dormitory. There were four baths in every bathroom. It's not a long time ago. They weren't safe places. Far from it. The average stay in that place was 30 years."
Winning the Mind Champion of the Year award last month is particularly special, says Perkins, because it was voted for by the public. Perkins beat household names such as Bill Oddie and Ruby Wax to take the gong. "I think [winning the Mind award] was much nicer than the OBE [awarded in June]," she says. "Being voted for was much better."
Perkins has no intention of easing into retirement and will be taking up consulting roles. "We've got to totally rethink mental health services," she says. "We need to be building up communities to accommodate mental distress and put professionals back in their boxes. I think what we've done is over-professionalise mental health."
Elaborating, Perkins explains that the irony of improvements in mental health service provision over the past 30 or so years – such as closing large asylums, introducing community-based services, and better access to a range of therapies – is that mental illness has been pathologised in a way that unwittingly promotes social exclusion of "a whole class" of people.
"The more we've developed highly sophisticated mental health services, the more, when we experience distress, we think, 'I've got to go to the experts.' Then [our] nearest and dearest think, 'Oh my god, they are not safe in my untrained hands. I've got to leave it to the experts.'"
It's not that mental health professionals aren't important or that therapy, drugs and other kinds of treatment don't have their place, Perkins insists. It is that an over-reliance on them stalls progress. "I'm not opposed to medication [for mental illness]. It's one of the things I use," she says.
What concerns Perkins is that often when trying to improve services – the recent emphasis by politicians and practitioners on "talking therapies", for example – the bigger questions around civil rights, dignity and independence are lost. "I don't believe that psychological therapy solves all ills. The more we translate the entire human process into therapy the more we render ordinary human misery and disturbance to the experts," she says.
Perkins's continued outspoken views on what still needs to change in the mental health arena are likely to ruffle the feathers of her fellow professionals and, if the ideas she promotes are eventually adopted, they could radically alter the way services are delivered
State benefits, a hot topic, is a case in point. As someone who describes herself as "a child of old Labour", Perkins appears slightly uncomfortable that her views on benefits are in some ways in line with those of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government. She says she is "torn" by some Conservative plans, such as caps on housing benefit, yet is in agreement with the proposal for "tapering" benefit payments so that people are incentivised to work. "So that every hour that someone works counts," she says.
Equal citizens
She goes on to argue that the focus by some campaigners on defending entitlement to benefits can reinforce the perception that people with mental health difficulties need to be cared for, rather than being thought of as equal citizens. "Instead of talking about the right to work, we are now talking about the right to benefits. I don't think that's terribly healthy," she says.
"Every human being gains their self-worth from being able to contribute to their communities – and let's face it, the most socially sanctioned way to do that is with work."
Perkins, a clinical psychologist, is probably best known for her impressive efforts to get people with mental health problems back into work, and has spearheaded employment programmes at South West London and St George's mental health trust.
Civil rights is at the core of what Perkins advocates, and she raises the topic frequently. Discussions around mental illness should resemble those around physical disability, she says, where the emphasis has been successfully rooted not on impairment but in a "rights-based agenda". In part, her inspiration heralds from a strand of mental health advocacy in the US that promotes a "peer support" approach to recovery and firmly places mental health in the realm of a broader rights agenda.
The difficulty for mental health campaigners in Britain, she suggests, is that they can end up ghettoised when they should be tapping into wide-ranging issues around exclusion. Equally, too many of the messages put out about mental illness are couched in negative terms, she claims. "The mental health movement has spent so long looking inwards at the sort of services people get, not better lives. One of the things I really hated about the mental health world was its aura of doom and gloom. It was always, 'You can't do anything because of stigma and prejudice.' [The] image of possibility often gets lost in the conversation about stigma. I'm not some romantic, but [change] is possible."
In particular, Perkins gives short shrift to anti-stigma campaigns, which have attracted substantial funding in recent years. "I don't have any evidence that they [work]. I prefer not to use the term stigma, because it attaches to the person. We don't talk about the stigma of race. We talk about racism. The problem with anti-stigma campaigns is that they identify the class of people by their impairment," she says. "I want to see some empirical data [that they help people to get] a home and a job. The bottom line [is] I want to change behaviour."
Discrimination
As her long career in the NHS nears its end, one of the themes that Perkins, 55, intends to persevere with is challenging the expectations of the state and employers when it comes to getting people into work and keeping them there. Mental health awareness training is not the answer to discrimination, she insists, adding that it is wrongheaded to demand that employers do the "heavy lifting" for people with mental health problems in the workplace when the state should do more.
When asked in 2009 by the last government to head a review into how to support more people with mental health problems into work, for example, Perkins proposed that employers be given financial compensation by the state to cover some of the cost of long periods of health-related absence.
The ability to work was vital to how Perkins dealt with her own mental health difficulties, which manifested in the early 1990s. But her ambition goes beyond getting people jobs. She wants a transformation in how mental health is perceived. "We've got to look at civil rights in the context of mental health and citizenship, rather than, 'You are a poor unfortunate.' That kind of thing is a hiding to more discrimination."
Spitting people out
Perkins's career path offers some insight into how her views have evolved. She considered going into academia after finishing her PhD but quickly came to the conclusion that research was dull. She applied to train as a clinical psychologist only to find herself rejected as someone who would "wilt" outside the confines of a university. Undeterred, she applied for and got a job as assistant psychologist at Broadmoor, the high security psychiatric institution.
The experience reaffirmed what she instinctively felt: "I've always been concerned about the way our society is very good at spitting people out at the bottom. That's always bothered me."
Clinical training followed, as well as several other jobs, including stints in "the old state bins", the large Victorian asylums that once warehoused patients. Perkins attributes her belief that work is the best route to a better life to those early experiences. She describes one institution she helped close in 1990: "There were 40 beds to a dormitory. There were four baths in every bathroom. It's not a long time ago. They weren't safe places. Far from it. The average stay in that place was 30 years."
Winning the Mind Champion of the Year award last month is particularly special, says Perkins, because it was voted for by the public. Perkins beat household names such as Bill Oddie and Ruby Wax to take the gong. "I think [winning the Mind award] was much nicer than the OBE [awarded in June]," she says. "Being voted for was much better."
Perkins has no intention of easing into retirement and will be taking up consulting roles. "We've got to totally rethink mental health services," she says. "We need to be building up communities to accommodate mental distress and put professionals back in their boxes. I think what we've done is over-professionalise mental health."
Elaborating, Perkins explains that the irony of improvements in mental health service provision over the past 30 or so years – such as closing large asylums, introducing community-based services, and better access to a range of therapies – is that mental illness has been pathologised in a way that unwittingly promotes social exclusion of "a whole class" of people.
"The more we've developed highly sophisticated mental health services, the more, when we experience distress, we think, 'I've got to go to the experts.' Then [our] nearest and dearest think, 'Oh my god, they are not safe in my untrained hands. I've got to leave it to the experts.'"
It's not that mental health professionals aren't important or that therapy, drugs and other kinds of treatment don't have their place, Perkins insists. It is that an over-reliance on them stalls progress. "I'm not opposed to medication [for mental illness]. It's one of the things I use," she says.
What concerns Perkins is that often when trying to improve services – the recent emphasis by politicians and practitioners on "talking therapies", for example – the bigger questions around civil rights, dignity and independence are lost. "I don't believe that psychological therapy solves all ills. The more we translate the entire human process into therapy the more we render ordinary human misery and disturbance to the experts," she says.
Perkins's continued outspoken views on what still needs to change in the mental health arena are likely to ruffle the feathers of her fellow professionals and, if the ideas she promotes are eventually adopted, they could radically alter the way services are delivered
Friday, 21 May 2010
Recovery
Recovery
Recovery is a process of hope and aspiration that signals the return to mainstream life for those who have experienced mental health problems. Recovery can take place regardless of whether the individual is symptom-free or not. Hope and recovery are recognised as key parts of the care pathway. Social inclusion bridge builders work with clients on a recovery programme based on the client's own choices and aspirations.
More about Recovery and the work of Dr. Pat Deegan
Recovery is a process of hope and aspiration that signals the return to mainstream life for those who have experienced mental health problems. Recovery can take place regardless of whether the individual is symptom-free or not. Hope and recovery are recognised as key parts of the care pathway. Social inclusion bridge builders work with clients on a recovery programme based on the client's own choices and aspirations.
More about Recovery and the work of Dr. Pat Deegan
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