Self Justification

Well, I'm now at home listening to Offenbach, drinking a beer and have the quiet sound of Kheema Mutter slowly bubbling away on the cooker-I made it through the first day back!

Not too bad a day after I dealt with the hundreds of mainly dull e mails. Had one minor crisis to deal with, thank goodness the world doesn't stop moving whilst I'm away. I'm really not that important. Then came to the delights of the day, statistics and my long delayed Annual Report.

Whether anyone actually reads it in detail I have no idea. It will of course report that in year 3 of my job at the University I saw more students than the year before; and indeed the year before that. The one thing that really irritates me about working, and the report bears that out, is that I always have to justify my existence.

This brings the even more interesting question of how one measures the effectiveness of mental health workers, or indeed services on a wider scale. Sadly I'm something of a one man band.

Is it how many of my students pass their courses? How many service users stay out of hospital? How many come off medication-in my experience of secondary services very few? How many get in to work? Or perhaps the bottom line is how many survive? Did someone say suicide prevention? (I sit on a working group on that!).

Perhaps more pertinent are the views of the funders! They are always at the root of everything that goes in mental health.

I'm never quite sure how to justify myself in this most interesting and varied field. For the time being I still have a job. Maybe cuts will put paid to that.

Talking of cuts, I'm not sure how new they are. Since I started work in 2001 I have worked for a Further Education College, a charity, Social Services (twice) and a University. Every year, in every organisation budgets have been cut.

I do however fear for the future of my many friends who do not work. Times are changing and we will see what reform brings. Even when well I struggled with unemployment and unemployability; when I finally found work it took me 8 years before I was better off than on benefits. More of that in the future though, Kheema Mutter almost done.

Bye for now.

I Heard a Voice.