The positive energy at the recent ‘Re-envisioning Mental Health Care’ conference organised by the local grassroots group CHARM in Manchester was palpable. Coming up from London to learn about all the amazing groups, projects and campaigns run by this collective of people with lived experience, family members and community activists was incredibly exciting, heartwarming and enjoyable.
Connection and empowerment were the common threads running through the huge diversity of CHARM’s activities, and this was epitomised in the wonderful Open Mic evening that kicked off the weekend. Taking place in the enchanting Community Garden Centre where CHARM hosts many of its meetings, the atmosphere was welcoming and relaxed – the human togetherness we had felt just as organic as the plants all around us.
Stepping up to the mic and having a whole roomful of people listening to the experiences that I was sharing through poems I had written was something special after the utter voicelessness I experienced as a patient in the psychiatric system. People simply sharing food, music, poetry and even communal drumming with a wonderful group called Rhythms of Resistance – the event was the exact opposite of the clinical, disempowering and socially isolating psychiatric environments that so many of us had experienced under the name of “mental health care”.
The next day we were sitting together again in a larger circle, to listen as group members shared their ongoing activities and brainstormed future plans in an interactive yet productively focused format, facilitated by Open Dialogue practitioners. The idea was to harvest the fruits of the previous season’s work and plant the seeds for future growth.
The project I was most inspired by was the ‘Gaining Autonomy Over Medication’ group. Running weekly as a hybrid in-person and online group, the members spoke movingly about the control they had regained through sharing information and above all being able to support each other throughout the process of personal decision making and psychiatric drug withdrawal (although the group was not prescriptive about coming off psychiatric drugs or exclusively for people who had decided to do that). The responsiveness of CHARM’s approach to self-organising was illustrated by the fact that although this group had initially been based on a structured approach developed by an organisation in Canada, they had decided after a couple of meetings to do things their own way and to use the resources they found most helpful as individuals, such as Anders Sorenson’s new book on psychiatric drug withdrawal ‘Crossing Zero’. My own agonising experience of withdrawing from psychiatric drugs would I’m sure have been less difficult to get through had I had access to this kind of mutual support, and I hope and pray that similar grassroots groups can be spread far and wide from these seeds.
We also heard about the different Hearing Voices groups that CHARM supports, including a women’s group and a Muslim group. Group members talked about how helpful it was to connect with others who share similar experiences and to hear how people can make sense of ‘psychosis’ from social, psychological and spiritual perspectives that are completely different to the dominant medical model.
But what came across as equally important were the social connections that these groups fostered beyond talking about voice hearing and mental health – the group days out gardening, shared meals and even rural retreats. I lost count of how many people throughout these discussions said how invaluable it was to spend time with people who “get it” and with whom they felt safe to be themselves. That open and accepting environment where people are free to be themselves was even reflected within the conference room where there was a rug and giant cushions, arts and crafts tables and a kitchen, as well as the circle of chairs.
A new area being explored by CHARM was the Open Dialogue approach, and they had recently arranged training for group members, delivered by practitioners who came over from the Netherlands. This initiative brought out the interaction between CHARM’s two complementary approaches to bringing about change in the arena of mental health: both constructing alternative community-based networks of support outside mainstream services, AND also organising as activists to demand that the local NHS mental health system changes. (The local MP had accepted their invitation to the conference and he spent some time listening and sharing his reflections).
Discussing ‘Open Dialogue’ led to reflections on the potential pitfall of the co-option by the mainstream system of successful social rights-based approaches, and the risk of undermining the core principles of such progressive practices and commodifying them as a brand, that can then be reduced to window dressing in coercive pathologising drug-based institutions. This topic also stimulated some discussion about the ways in which the ideas we were trying to put into practice were on the one hand radical in how utterly alien they are to the psychiatric status quo. But on the other hand these are not new ideas or practices at all in the history of humanity, but are basically the ways in which human beings have helped each other through emotional distress and madness, in many different cultures before and beyond our modern Western societies.
Other initiatives that CHARM members shared about were a Food and Mind nutrition group, a collaboration with a new therapeutic farm in Ireland, a Hearing Voices Cafe, a campaign against local NHS data contracts with the spy-tech firm Palantir, an experience of delivering training within the local branch of the mental health charity Mind, and an innovative potential new initiative to facilitate “compassionate crews” of volunteers who would be ready to support community members and their families at times of mental crisis, just as lifeboat crews stand by in case of a storm… I headed home buzzing and buoyed up with hope from experiencing so much activist energy, innovative thinking, openess, community, connection, love and joy!
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Mad in the UK hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.