Psychosis

And then I fell into a relationship with someone a lot younger than me and people said, “You shouldn’t go out with her she’s got a history for violence.” And but I’d been on me own for about God knows who many years so I thought ‘in for a penny in for a pound’ you know what it’s like at times, and at first everything was okay and then one Friday night she got extremely drunk and I realised that [laughs] it was the Friday again and for no reason she smashed a vase in me face and put fourteen stitches in me face and carved me body up like a draughts board, and that went to Crown Court, and [name] came with me, and we came out of court and she said to, “How are you?.” I said, “I’m glad it’s over [name].” She said, “I didn’t ask you that Pete, I said how are you?” I said, “I’m alright.” And she said, “How are your voices?” And I suddenly realised I hadn’t got any. She says, “You’ve just turned the corner of your life, everybody reaches a major turning point and this is it for you. Any other time this amount of stress would put you back in hospital.” She said, “You’ve got to build on it.” And I said, “Well I don’t know what to do.” And she said, “Well there’s a pub across road, we’re going to go in there and if we have to sit in there and get drunk we’re not leaving until you decide what you’re going to do.” So you can imagine I dragged that conversation out as long as I could. And eventually she encouraged me to start a Hearing Voices Group, I was reluctant at first, I’d been to one years before at Sheffield Mind and that had closed down and we started the group together and today we’ve now got eighty-five members and that was really the start of me turning point on recovery by getting more involved with services. 

You see we talk about institutionalisation as if it’s part of being in the hospital but I think institutionalisation in the community is as big an issue I think I, you know, I think when we move from hospital-based care to community-based care, what we did is we created trans-institutionalisation where we transferred the institution to the community and that is still as bad an institution as the thing, and, and, and the thing a, the biggest thing about that is we moved loads of staff out of the institutions and put them into the community, without trying to work on any change programme with them, so you can take the staff out of the institution but could you take the institution out of the staff? Which would have been a question that should have been asked in the Eighties, you know, it never was asked so it was probably too late. and I think this trans-institutionalisation means that people for instance will stay on community nurse’s books for years and they don’t need it. But it’s almost like a community, I’ve met Psychiatric Nurses and other people that have fifty-five on the caseload, but when you actually go and work through their caseload with them there’s twelve active you know, and the rest they, they’re are either doing a Depot or phoning once a month to make sure they’re okay but they’re on their caseload so they don’t get any more work. And rightly so because I think you can work with much more than twelve active anyway but surely we should be able to discharge them you know, and get them off caseload and say, “These are the, these people are no longer on the, in the system.” You know? so I, I guess for me that the hardest part about this going back and forward was breaking that institutional thinking in my own head. That I, because you’re socialised into being a patient, you know the system creates more than just the diagnosis it creates this, patient that’s a patient whether they’re in hospital or out of hospital, like most people when they go to Out-patients don’t consider themselves patients you know? They’re going to get normally get discharged you know, there’s, it’s a follow-up after an operation they’re going to get discharged, don’t think to yourself, you don’t think ‘I am a heart patient’ you know, whereas in Psychiatry you know? And they need that illness because that’s reflects for them then who they think they are. Yeah. For me it’s about moving beyond that, thinking ‘I, this is not who I am, this is who I am, I’m all these different parts, you know, I’m the four faces of men or man’ or whatever, however you want to describe it.