Mikki Elvin - the Winds Whistling

Over the holidays I learned that a colourful Birmingham UK mental health activist named Michael ' Mikki' Elvin had died in November of cancer.

Apart from the shock of hearing that Mikki - the name he preferred to use - had died I was, even as someone who had got on the wrong side of him a few times, really concerned that Mikki's body and personal belongings had been laying in a morgue for months because council officials had not been able to trace his next of kin .

Beyond the sheer human tragedy of this I was also concerned because Mikki Elvin had chaired the Birmingham, the UK's second largest city, MH Patient and Public Involvment Forum, and this had resulted in him getting embroiled in a year long wrangle with the Commission for Patient and Public Involvment ,the Government quango that oversees the management of the national PPI Forum structure, at the same time as he was involved in legal action against Birmingham City Council Social Services trying to access basic MH services.

How on earth does meaningful Patient and Public Involvment result in this horrendous outcome?

The system invited Mikki to contribute as a patient but as soon as he became overly critical or unwell it lost sight of him as a patient and person and simply labelled him as a problem to be swatted and squashed. The CPPIH and Birmingham City Council lawyers had no problem digging up dirt on Mikki in the courts or behind the scenes but services made no effort to find out anything about him.

Where was the care and support for this man?

This is a scandal and there should be an independent inquiry to establish whether the way the CPPIH and Birmingham City Council treated Mikki as a problem and failed to support him as a patient contributed to his death. I strongly suspect that it did.

Mikki's website Jarmi is still online. Let the man speak for himself.