The Recovery Conundrum.

Way back in 1996 as I lived severe mental illness I met a man called Ian. He did a talk at my local day hospital about education and mental health. That building epitomised the moribund stuckness of my life as a madman. Allegedly a high intensity therapeutic environment in which we would all be cured and sent back to marvels of reality with new life skills. I stayed 8 years and learned nothing. Yet on that evening in October 1996 Ian convinced me that there was merit in education and that it might help me get somewhere other than the awful place I inhabited at the time.

Open Door as he called it began life as a pilot scheme in the spring of 1997 with the express purpose of getting those of us with severe and enduring mental health problems back into mainstream education. As a graduate of Open Door I went on to study A level Philosophy, the PGCE in History at Cambridge and finally back to work with Ian. Education was vital for getting started on recovery; Risperidone did the rest. Of course not everyone was as successful as me. Many progressed so far, it helped in their mental health but did not allow them back into what society deemed relevant; work and paying taxes.

My journey took me in 2007 to the University where I found the Centre for Mental Health Recovery and the Hertfordshire Annual Recovery Conference. In 2008 I presented a workshop to 60 people on employment and mental health; it was a triumph. Yet we still lacked something. And that something is how do we measure outcome? Outcome is in the eye of the beholder. And the beholder realistically is the funder.

Today I attended the 9th Annual Conference. Theme this year was education. A key part is so called Recovery Colleges. Yes I heard inspirational speakers. Yes I met many friends and collaborators. But I could not help thinking that we are merely recreating what we did in the 1990s and those mixed results that brought. Open Door no longer exists. I suspect cuts came as a result of only anecdotal evidence and testimony. The most telling statistic today was that of 385 attending such a college in Yorkshire only 7 had found paid work. I truly believe that recovery is not all about work, conformity and convention. But I'm not funding it so what I think is irrelevant. We must judge our own recovery but society will also judge us.

It made me feel quite sad really. We are driven by the money trail. What I call the Tripos holds true, the complex relationship between the system, the workers and the money. For without each other nothing in mental health would exist but illness.

A friend described Charon's Ferry as being s very bleak book. As she put it "I didn't realise being well could be so difficult". We all want a magic solution. I found one in Risperidone. But then I had to find my place in society. A society from which I hid and it hid from me for all those years. Food for thought I guess.

I Heard a Voice.