Highcroft Lifebook Video
While Surrey & Borders , the Surrey PCT and various unaccountable and largely self-interested mental health charities have been wasting time and public money dithering over the future of the Old Moat Garden Centre Paul Brian Tovey and a few other determined people up in Birmingham have got a user led Birmingham Arts group off the ground and Paul's own enabling work - the lifebook project - can be seen in the following video.
For more details on obtaining the full video and getting more info on the Birmingham Arts group go here
Labels: Highcroft Lifebook
posted by simply human @ 8:47 pm
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I am very grateful for all your help Des . I only wish more of us were able to take more control over what we want to say and how to do it with more facilities .
You've always been right about the falsity of the Top Down corporate structures dominating funding and opportunities .
Our Group is bottom up - we sustained it for a long time before being given an Awards For All grant ..
Its a bloody hard compromising road for Users and made all the harder by Govt , MH Charities and the insistence on clothing those with corporate fitness with more power and abiltiy to corral us control the outcomes of anything they say , and milk us .
The bullshit spoken by Charity related figures about "On Our Own Terms" really means on their terms .
The only way to help Users is to de-corporatise and create partly markestised User Choice . If this is ever matched with more local money and grants for individual Users and coupled with more User controlled therapeutic support then the State will diminish and front line effectiveness will be driven by Users themselves ..
The Elitist MH industry would then flatten down its false economic and charity pyramids ..
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I think this is a very timely Project. If Service users use Lifebook Format perhaps secretly then maybe Data can be built up of actual SU Experiences.
I have been waiting a long time before posting. I am watching developments keenly.
Mountain View is a pretty good location to keenly watch from....
But I agree , when Service Users use new tools to document their own lives and experiences that's going to generate data useful to people who want to be able to map out the bigger picture , help support Service Users better and even predict where local interventions actually welcomed, needed and trusted by Service Users might be better made.
As for secrecy , many Service Users feel that 'confidentiality' has been used as a way to silence them and conceal their histories so want to very publicly speak of their experiences however it shouldnt be too hard to just filter out peoples names when looking at a large set of Service User's experiences.
The personal and largescale and qualitative and quantitative aspects arent at odds here. All life is data.
A fear is policies and procedures and not knowing which ones are infracted on.
For instance C4 are interested in doing my flat for How clean is your house? Are SU to be denied experiences like that in name of P&P and hidden agendas. I sometimes think we need to be like the Secret Service. Know dangers which are many and dangerous and act accordingly.
I think it is a matter of agency lack of ?
Academics must NOT be allowed to steal our ideas depriving US of ACADEMIC IDENTITY.
How to handle? Even site visits. I believe we are intellectually vulnerable and should regard ourselves as Autodidacts in style of Working Class who became Professors etc out of incredible odds, with the Establishment acting to suppress the Movement. Maybe building a History A Database like ESDS Qaulidata at Essex is way forward and to be engaging in the most seriously academic educations** I mean Sciences mathematics Research leds if our true estate is really Service User not yet Academics!!!!
Yes, Service Users are vunerable but that vunerability , like confidentiality, is so often used to keep them silent and allow others to speak on their behalf .
If Service Users want/need to put information about their experiences out there in the public domain , and I believe they do , as named individuals or anonymously then that information will inevitably be sought out by people who want to use it for good and bad, including academics.
Who owns and controls information about us once we give it out is a bigger question - and that goes for everyone not just Mental Health Service Users .
If we want a more open and fairer society we are going to have to learn to speak out and challenge more rather than just expecting academics , service providers , politicians or whoever to change their ways for us.
My thrust with the Lifebook and the film is clear really . You (others) have to find your own voice and when you do it unravels the internal emotional geography into a land that is slowly understandable and what's more feel-able.
The perversion of what are called "Services" is they rarely support that trek of damages in any way that is sustained with support - in fact they undermine it more often than not.
Des is correct in saying that Users of services have their confidentiality used against them . Its true too that their "case" will be regarded as a psychiatric object but also something that they the User do not possess .
We (society) have lost the idea of complicated social and personal failture being attributable to family mores and continued patterns of subtle and not so subtle negative emotional encodements.
Imprints of a lack of empathic skill and cold and dissociational interactions are not discussed by Services or even targeted with human treatment as the forming forces of people .
A lot of so called "therapists" in the NHS are useless and have not spent any time unravelling their own neuroses and contradictions . The biggest one being working for the State that supresses patient choice of treatments .
Oh we all have "Lifebooks" in us for sure . My feeling is we need to write them or try because its like having your own real tongue. I've tried to do what I can because 22 years ago I got some real help - outside the system - but have always realised I am going to die partly of the sick imprints that cannot be cured but only lived with.
Shit shortens lives but I want my memory and my struggle to create my family and personal flag to remain a little beyond me because of my own personal grief and anguish about my family and myself .
You see .....It comes from there really . The human spirit ...Sorrow. Feelings .
And that is political because it expresses autonomy and is threatening to the State which wants conformity and uniformity in mental health. Being more of yourself is a political act that is for sure ..
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