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Workshop sessions
thing – humans are social animals. We need to come together.’
‘We’ve got to really be the change, to make our voices heard,’ said Chris Ford. ‘You
need to have those discussions with your local Health and Wellbeing Board. You need
to get drugs and alcohol on the agenda, because otherwise it won’t happen.’
*****
ON MESSAGE
How do you set up a magazine? How do you engage with
social media? Mark Brown and Nigel Brunsdon divided their
communications workshop between the traditional and modern,
with advice for getting the best out of both
‘The challenge is to get from the service user experience something that works for
everyone else,’ said Mark Brown, founder and editor of
One in Four
magazine,
describing how he set up a publication for people needing support with mental health
issues. ‘Use the personal experience as the fire that drives you.’
He had begun his venture as a service user wanting more information, a perspective
that drove the content and style of the magazine.
‘I wanted to show real life through the prism of mental health,’ he said. This
included plenty of ‘everyday stuff’, looking at lifestyle issues and how to deal with
them, rather than focusing on life stories. He was, he said, adamant from the start that
he didn’t want the publication to become just a forum for sharing personal stories.
‘A lot of people who have had mental health issues have had bad experiences and this
becomes your story – it can become inescapable,’ he explained. ‘We wanted to jump the
gap from something great for people working on it, to something great for people to read.’
With a group of colleagues, he ‘hammered out’ what sort of magazine
One in Four
was going to be, and agreed statements to define the point of the publication for
people writing in it.
Participants in the workshop identified with this. A member of Wolverhampton’s
Service User Involvement Team (SUIT) commented: ‘We do a magazine whose
‘We’ve got to really be the change, to
make our voices heard... You need to
get drugs and alcohol on the agenda,
because otherwise it won’t happen.’
DR CHRIS FORD,
right to treatment workshop
LAST NOVEMBER
I wrote in
DDN
about the
need to value ourselves and accept all of the
identities that make up who we are. I said that
‘when services start by valuing each and every
individual where they are in the “now” and
not where they would like them to be, then
we’ll be on the road to ‘recovery-orientation’.’
So how do we go about ‘valuing’ people? Do
we put a lot of energy into comprehensive
assessments that will identify all the ‘needs’
people have; their gaps and deficits? Do we
generate new professional competencies and
unearth new ‘evidence’ that will justify our expertise as we ‘do things to
people’? Do we continue to build new edifices and layers of bureaucracy that
will promote our deeply entrenched deficit culture?
Or will we take a leap of faith and start to build new cultures of recovery
in our communities (I stress community over ‘services’) that will embrace all
of us; cultures of recovery where all are welcome and everyone is
recognised as having strengths? Are we ready for an asset-based approach
within our services and communities? Are we ready to take on
responsibility for ourselves and others?
These were some of the questions that I asked at our UKRF conference
in January this year, and again at
Be the change
. If we want to ‘be the
change that we want to see’, were we willing to give up some of our
dependence on the ‘experts’? Were we willing to accept that all human
beings have the same needs, the same drivers toward health and
wellbeing? Were we willing to explore our strengths and begin to make
visible the ‘abundance’ (as John McKnight describes it) that exists in all
communities? Were we ready to wake up to the power we have if we come
together in our communities, as equal partners, to share our strengths?
At the UKRF conference, the 250 or so people present (recovery activists
and service users from all over the UK) said yes, and this was also the
response from the people in the asset-based workshop I facilitated at
Be the
change
. In a world that is seeing many of our ‘respectable institutions’ crack
and fragment into discredited cliques, as received notions of equality and
justice are eroded and devalued, there are many people who still believe in
the possibility of positive change.
If we accept that ‘recovery-orientation’ is a new paradigm built on
strengths, which rejects a mainstream deficit culture founded on all sorts of
dependence (drugs representing just one among a multitude that can
imprison us in our own minds) we must look to those who have the courage
to find strengths and abilities in all, beginning with the values that bind us
together as human beings.
We must take the small steps on diverse paths that will allow us to define
and maintain our own recovery. In Preston and Birminghamwe started with a
small action. We sat together and shared some of our strengths. Energy, hope
and ideas were generated and the beginnings of a conversation that started to
explore how we could be the change we wanted to see.
I believe it can start with this; for all our fragility as human beings we
have strengths and for all our strengths we have fragility. If we start here I
believe we can be the change.
Alistair Sinclair is a director of the UK Recovery Foundation (UKRF)
VOICES OF RECOVERY
BEING THE CHANGE
Alistair Sinclair
’s workshop on asset-based
recovery showed that there are many people
who believe in the possibility of positive change