And then we had a massive recession in this country, and I lost me job and I couldn’t find work. Well we were under a lot of financial pressure and we, they were going to take the house of us, we’d be homeless, and I, I finished, I got involved in organised crime and it’s not something that’s clever and it’s something I’ll never think, well I’ll be proud of. But going through that period of time, I thought, To do this you’ve got to, you’ve not got to have a conscience And I did [laughs], and I used to worry about going to prison and losing me family and, all the time I would be pouring more and more pressure on meself. Eventually I did find work and I was working seven days a week but, the bills and the, the outstanding money was immense and we, we couldn’t catch up and, that through the stress and the pressure the voices came back and, I always remember the first time it came back really dominant, it was a real loud shouting voice, it was a Friday evening and I was walking through Sheffield town centre and this voice kept screaming at me saying, You’re Mickey McAvoy, you’re worth millions And Mickey McAvoy was the guy who robbed the Brinks Mat gold and I foolishly believed this, you know, and , thinking I would got all this money stashed away I walked into this pub and bought everybody a drink and then bought another one so you can imagine the problems when I got home with no money. And this went on for quite a long time but I still never disclosed, I had this big fear of disclosure, of not being believed. And, eventually a friend of mine asked me to go in business with him, and we set up this business and in the first year we turned over a million pound, but then with that comes a lot of stress and pressure and, we were working eighteen hours a day seven days a week. And because I would never told me wife about the abuse, because the major problem was what the abuser did to me of, some of it was quite disgusting, but I would got over that through dissociation, I didn’t feel the pain, but it’s what she said, it was the mind games and me mind had never healed from the, from the fear.

And I know you talked a little bit about it before but what’s been your personal experience of medication?

Very, very negative, it never ever took the voices away dictation now. I believe the stomach problems are linked to long term use of antipsychotics probably never, they’d never admit to that. but as I say I was naïve, when I went into the system I didn’t know anything about psychiatry or Mental Health, I saw the psychiatrist as being the expert, Take these they will cure you

They didn’t. You just need to take a bit more and they will cure you And it went on and on and on to the point I was on, as far as I can remember at times two thousand four hundred milligrams of Sulpiride forty-five milligrams of Stelazine, I was on Fluoxetine, Mesoridazine, Lofepramine, Chlorpromazine all at the same time to the point I just, been I actually, to the one point I actually got weekend leave from the hospital and I managed to walk to the bus stop and I sat there for three hours, I just couldn’t get off the wall until, a nurse going off shift said to me, Why are you sat here? I said, I just can’t get off the bus And I had to be taken back to the ward because I didn’t get a, I wasn’t given anything, muscle relaxants or anything it was absolutely horrendous but the voices I thought were getting worse.

To be honest, honest with you Laura I don’t get involved in that much in recovery because I think its wrong why are we telling people how to recover? That’s, and it, it’s a bone of contention with me, it’s fantastic that people are recovering but, as a society, we don’t learn from history and if you don’t learn from history you will never progress. And what my argument is man has recovered from all sorts of things since he walked this planet, how? Because man has got a capacity to recover what he needs is love and compassion and guidance, we don’t need tools for recovery, we don’t need models for recovery, if somebody had a model for recovery, oh my God what a waste of time, or you don’t fit this model so it’s your fault you’re not recovering, you’re drug resistant, you’re non-compliant, you’re not trying because this model works we’ve done it on forty people, come on, how many people go to the Mental Health Services and I think the problem is, because man has always recovered, by it’s own capacity to recover, we’re turning recovery into a science it has been hijacked by the services, this is why we’ve got to do it, this is measured outcomes, crap absolute waste of time, but it’s good that people are focussing on recovery, that’s the positive thing, but to me I have a framework and this is what I work with clients in Denmark with and the, a framework is something that has to be , adaptable, can bend and bow to suit everyone’s needs. Now if you want to work on something so that people can see the recovery scrap your models it’s a square peg round hole, I think. But what I use is I was a tree, but the tree’s symbolic, now the roots are safe housing, if someone is not safe you will not recover, it is an impossibility seventy percent of the homeless are mentally ill and we have to look at why that is, because we have dumping grounds for the mentally ill, we discharge them from acute services, maybe blunted in expression, acting bizarre, like a bit unkempt and we’ve put them on crap housing estates and people think it’s funny to take the piss, they call them names, they throw things at them, they draw on, draw on the windows, put dog shite through the letterbox, I know because I was that person I don’t care how good a therapist is, you can work with a person, you send them back to that environment you’re wasting your time, it’s the government issue that has got to be addressed, it’s an international crisis what is happening with the mentally ill. So we have to start with safe housing, and then, especially around paranoia and hearing voices, I know recovery’s a big thing it encompasses a lot of things but I’m just focussing on those two. I see the trunk as being the trunk support, now what will I will say to someone is let’s look at who you can use outside the statutory and voluntary sector’ because you can’t possibly rely on them for the rest of your life. So ask them to try and identify two or three people they will identify in a crisis. Then you record them on the trunk, and the branches are about achievable goals, now let’s say someone’s been socially isolated through voices and paranoia for a period of three months, and then you get them to go to the corner shop or into the garden that is their recovery. But I get on the, on the leaf I put the time and the date. And then when you perhaps progress more on, further in their recovery because you can’t define someone’s recovery we put the time and the date, then after a period of twelve months or six months if a person says, My life’s not improving. Yes it is this is where you were, now look at where you are. Well, after that session, each session you have to refers to hold the back, and I, Do you still feel safe? Hasanybody moved in? Have you been victimised? You’ve got to keep checking all the time but it’s good for the worker as well to see. Who sort of say this is how you’ve got to recover after. We’re play a dangerous game, we’re setting people up to fail basically, you know, people, I know there’s people out there they’ll say you can’t be recovered unless you come off your drugs I don’t agree with that, I’m not anti-medication, I think it’s a working tool it won’t cure but if someone goes from twenty milligrams of Olanzapine to five, and they’re happy to stay on that, and live their life on that, why should we define, why should we define that that’s their recovery? It’s the, it should be their definition and what recovery is not telling people.

Eventually me appendix burst and I was rushed to hospital in the early hours of the morning and I was in A&E in the waiting room and it was seven oclock before I got seen, and fortunately me partner had come with me and they said to me, you know, What’s been happening? And they did a blood test, apparently with your appendix your white blood count’s supposed to drop but mine didn’t, and they said, Have you took any drugs Well I reeled off all these anti-psychotics [laughs] I think he knew it might be relevant, and he said, this is gospel truth, and this nurse came back and said , Are you going to tell us the truth what you’re doing here? don’t waste our time And me partner was really kicking up a fuss and eventually this surgeon come and he did a rebound test, and it nearly put me through the roof and he says, This guy’s got appendicitis I, it was ten oclock in the morning I’d been there since three in the morning when I got admitted to the ward, I was placed on morphine, ten oclock at night the same surgeon come back and said , And we’re really busy in theatre we’ll probably just drain your stomach and send you home Then me partner said, You can’t you’re going to kill him And I was sent for an ultrasound then and me appendix had burst and there was an abscess on it. But it was three oclock in the morning before they actually operated, so I’d been there twenty-four hours, and as luck would have it I knew one of the theatre technicians, and he came to see me partner afterwards and he says, He was an hour from death He says, he, he said, It had all gone to peritonitis through his body He says, We opened up his stomach and we had to leave it for ten minutes because of the smell of the poison And he says, We washed his stomach out three times before we actually started work on it And I’d been out of hospital a week and the peritonitis came back, I got straight back in, and it’s just been an accumulation of event, it’s, it’s never been right from that point.

Can you describe your admission to services?

I can the first time was very, very frightening, the GP had come and he said, I think you should go in hospital Now I was ignorant to Mental Health and I mean very, very ignorant, so I never thought of the Mental Health Services I thought he was going to put me in a general ward I thought nurses fussing around for a couple of weeks that’s not too bad’, you know? [Laughs] so me Dad said, Well I’ll take him And he took me to the local Psychiatric Unit and it was a real eye-opening experience it was absolutely filthy there was people laid on the corridors, there was double mattresses on single beds, it was really, really frightening as well. Anyway and I was put in this, this like observation room and this female doctor came to see me and asked me what had been happening so I tried to explain, and the, her next comment really, really shook me because she actually said, I’m going to start by giving you a rectal examination And I couldn’t understand why, I thought it was an elaborate plot, they just want to abuse me again and the fact it was a female saying it and I would been abused by a female. So I tried to run away I run out, I ran, tried to run out the hospital, and at this point I hadn’t been sectioned, and this nurse said, You can leave but if you leave we’ll section you Which I’ve learnt, I found out its illegal because it’s coercion. So I decided to stay and me behaviour spiralled out of control and I was sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

But eventually what I did I had to, I come up with this strategy to come off them, my last consultant that I had when I was in the system, and I had a lot of time for him, I had a lot of respect for him, because you could have a conversation with him and he was dictatorial, so what I would do is, I’d got no money and, and everything but I thought I need to replace the drugs with something’ so, what I did, every, one, once a morning, once, sorry, every, every morning once a day I would get up, I’d get dressed, and I might take a small percentage of the drugs off, but I would walk, if I get the endorphins going. I was self-stimulating and I’d blank me mind or think about what I want to do for the future and I might just do it for thirty minutes, but by blocking the voices for thirty minutes I was extending time as the drugs came down otherwise I’d just sit there and think oh me drugs have gone down what will happen?’ and the anxiety brought the voices on. But then I saw, there was an old man I used to live next door to and I noticed every Wednesday he went walking and he’d be gone for hours. So this one Wednesday morning I followed him, I weren’t stalking him I just wondered where he was getting to you know? And he went out into the countryside and, when he got back I asked him, I said, [Name] could I come walking with you on a Wednesday He says, Of course you can And I would walk with [Name] but I, that was the only day that, that I would drop a bigger percentage off me drugs. And he would tell me what his wife was like, what he’d done in the war, what businesses he’d had, and we’d walk for four or five hours and I wasn’t focussing on the voices, and that’s how I started to replace it with time, and company, and endorphins and eventually I got I, eventually I got them off them all up here for a period of time.

And did you come up with strategy on your own…

Yeah, yes

…with someone?

I came up on me own I thought I’ve got to replace these drugs with something’ otherwise I’ll just sit around and I’ll get anxious and worried and the voices will come back so it was just something I developed myself.

I was trying to make sense of all these things and, I had nine people working for me on the shop floor when I had me business, and I hadn’t seen one of them since me first admission so I thought ‘well perhaps they’re me disciples who will betrayed me had this, I’d had this out of body experience so I’d died and resurrected I’d been on the acute ward so I’ve been to Hell and back if it’s, I’ve got to be Jesus Christ it can’t be any other explanation and we always said you’re not a fully paid up member of the Psychotic Society unless you’d been Jesus so [laughs] I thought with this new found information ‘what shall I do?’ I thought ‘well I’ll go to Sheffield Cathedral, I’ll go and show myself. So I made me way there in me scruffy state, but as I got to the big wooden doors I thought ‘oh crikey they crucified Christ’ ‘I must have a last supper. So I went to McDonalds and got this Sausage and Egg McMuffin, contemplating me crucifixion, then [laughs] then, I went back to Cross and I went in and a man stopped me and he says, What, what do you want? I said, Well I’ve come to see the main man, I’ve come to show myself. He chatted to me for about ten minutes, he didn’t really listen to what I was saying and then he left me, now I’ve never been in the Cathedral since, there was a pulpit facing the more, main auditorium, but there’s a pulpit side on, and this vicar was doing this sermon in the side on pulpit to some old age pensioners. So I seized me chance I ran down the cathedral they never saw me coming and I jumped in the pulpit at the side of him, and he actually spun round and went, Christ Almighty..I thought ‘well fantastic he’s recognised me’ ‘he saw through’ you know? [laughs]. And he had to stop the sermon and he took me in this back room and he said, Now what are you playing at? And I swore, I thought you recognised me. And we had this long drawn-out conversation which finished up with him saying, Have you ever been in a mental hospital? I said, Well a few times what’s that got to do with anything like? You know? This, I think this was February or something like that, he said, I’m starting a group for people with Mental Health problems in September would you like to come? And he took me details but I never heard from him again like so. But I was quite disillusioned I wasn’t the Messiah I thought I’d got it all worked out at that point [laughs]. But the groups in, again involved more with the network because when I set up this group with [name] I was still having problems with me own experience and, I remembered the network and I managed to track them down to Manchester, and I spoke to this lady on the telephone, and she says, Go and buy a book called Accepting Voices by Marius Romme and Sandra Escher. And I read this book, it took me a long time because of the concentration problems, but it, I was so inspired it was an amazing thing and I suddenly thought ‘the system’s wrong’ the system is so wrong on this, and I then invited the network to Sheffield, I said, Will you come and do a workshop? And we’ll raise some money, we’ll raise our profile. And I was talking to the main speaker at the end, now all they knew about me I was a voice hearer he didn’t know anything else and I said to him, I like the way you work with voices but you’re talking about voices with identities, mine have no identity they’re demonic. And they have no agenda either. And he just looked up and he looked me straight in the face and he said, Peter address the demons of your past. And the demons of my past was my abuser and as a grown man when saw I was still running away. So I realised eventually I got to address these demons and, I saw her one Saturday afternoon walking down the road and me first instinct was to run away again, but I didn’t, I kept walking, but I kept eye contact all the way, and as I got close to her she looked at the floor, she wouldn’t look me in the face and I suddenly thought ‘perhaps I could still get this woman in trouble but just by getting her to look away had altered the power difference she didn’t have a hold over me.

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.

I was embarrassed to say I heard voices, the most problematic was the amount the drugs they gave me because when I eventually did get a diagnosis, the Consultant who gave me the diagnosis he, I can remember his words as clear as anything, he said, Mister Bullimore you are a chronic Schizophrenic, you will never ever work again, go away and enjoy your lifeAnd I remember thinking well how does that work?’, and he says, Take these drugs and they will cure you Which is a complete lie because it never cured anybody in a hundred years but, but not knowing that I complied and I was very compliant to the point where I was taking twenty-five anti-psychotics a day. And I couldn’t walk me arms were rigid in front of me, I was a shuffle feet, I wouldn’t dare try and shave because I would have cut me head off with [laughs]with the razor. But that’s what people thought Schizophrenia was I personally don’t believe in Schizophrenia now but, that Pete’s a Schizophrenic, that’s how they look but it wasn’t it was the drugs.

Right I first attended a group , at Sheffield Mind years, years before and it was a Social Worker that kept, it were, it were, in fact me wife got a Social Worker I didn’t but he made contact with me and told me about this group and, I said I wasn’t going to go, but he kept encouraging me, now I’d become the archetypical Schizophrenic, I didn’t wash, I didn’t shave, I was really scruffy and I, I made me way to this group one day and there was ten other people there, and what really struck me was they were all smart and presentable, and I remember thinking well how can they be Schizos if they’re not scruffy like me?. And they started to talk about their experiences and it was amazing, I actually thought I can take this mask off I don’t have to pretend anymore’ and it was, it was like a liberating feeling and, and I felt welcome and I listened to what they’d, happened in their lay lives and moved forward, and then they invited me to a Workshop at St. Matthews Church Hall, and I didn’t know what a Workshop was. I got there and I were thinking well where’s the benches? What are we going to make?’ and in walked three people from the Hearing Voices Network and [sighs] just one guy with him he was a, he was a psychologist called Terry McLaughlin, and he’d started the network in this country. And, and I listened to all these people talk, people talking about trauma in their life and linking to voices and I suddenly thought perhaps there’s another explanation from what I’ve been told. But I was still on really heavy drugs so, you know, I couldn’t act on it but a, the seed had been sown about this, in this organisation, and I remember approaching Terry at the end, I didn’t know him from Adam, and I says to him, Hi I’m Peter Bullimore and I’m a schizophrenic so I must be mad, can you tell me when [Clears throat] sorry. I’ll be classed as insane And I was, and I’ve, I’ve got to Terry really well over the years and he just looked at me and he says, Peter He says, Why do you say you’re mad? And why do you use the word schizophrenia I says, Because that’s what I’ve been told He says, Hearing voices has nothing to do with schizophrenia He says, You’re not mad, it’s society that doesn’t understand And his words were so profound, and they’ve always lived with me for years those words and it was kind of a big turning point meeting again others and looking at these different explanations but I tried to speed up the process I thought I can do this on me own’, you know the no man’s an island and I thought I was that island you know? And I stopped going to the group, I didn’t realise how much support I was losing.

Oh initially as a child life was quite difficult, [tuts] I had very, very loving parents but we used to have a childminder that would come round on a Friday evening and look after us, and after a period of time I started to experience sick sexual and physical abuse off this woman from the age of five up to about the age of thirteen. I would say about, when I was about seven year old that’s when I first started to hear voices. But the voices were quiet reassuring and, comforting at that time. I never told anybody because there was a, there was a big fear about abuse, I was very, very frightened to mention to anyone. and when I got to about eleven I think it was, the abuse and the voices changed, the abuse got more severe , it got more disgusting, but the problem was in it, in some ways me body responded which said I was enjoying it and it really, really confused me, how could I be enjoying something that I actually hated? And from that point the voices took a sinister turn, one became ten, ten became twenty, and they told me to harm meself and harm other people, and I would do, I would be out assaulting people and nobody could understand me behaviour, even to the point where I tried throwing meself down the stairs, and like a suicide attempt, I just really started to lose control but still never disclosed to anyone. I think the lowest point was probably when I was about thirteen year old but it proved to be a massive turning point as well. This woman had come round mid, mid-week while I was doing me homework and said to me parents, I’ll go and give him hand to do his homework And she had full sex with me, upstairs. And I had this big fear, what if she’s pregnant? I’ll get blamed for this’ and everything else, and obviously it turned out she wasn’t pregnant, but it gave me the courage to say to me parents, I can look after meself, I don’t want thi woman to come round And they agreed, and the interesting thing was once the abuse stopped the voices went away. But it laid repressed and buried, I never told them the bit about the voices or the abuse.

And I think when me wife started to really realise was she wanted to foster a child because our children were at school full time and we’d got plenty of money and a big house and she wanted to, something to do, you know, she arranged for a Social Worker to come and visit us and, this journey home to visit this Social Worker should have took me thirty minutes but it took me three hours because if I saw someone I thought I knew I would drive in a different direction, I couldn’t get home because I thought I knew people and they were all out to harm me. And eventually I did get home and this Social Worker amazingly was still there and she was an elderly lady about five foot tall and I’ll never forget her, she had a red coat on and a black beret, and she was in the front room and, and as I walked into the front room I was bombarded with more voices than I’ve ever heard, it was a real crescendo, and he kept screaming, That’s a man dressed up and a French spy, you should get him out of here So [laughs] I turned and walked out and me wife said, What’s wrong? And I said, That’s a man, it’s a French spy you must get them out of here So she asked this lady to leave and, as she was leaving this lady said, Well why do you want me to leave you’ve invited me here. And me wife said, Well [laughs] me husband thinks you’re a man and a French spy So she [laughs] then she, You’re not going to lost, let us foster kids [laughs] after things like that you know And she told me to go to the GP and, I did and I explained what was happening and he just said, You’re stressed, take these Beta Blockers you’ll be fine

And they didn’t really help and again I still had this big fear of disclosure what had really happened, and I hadn’t slept for days and, a real bad period of insomnia and it was in the early hours of Sunday morning, I had an out of body experience, I was out of me body, I couldn’t get back in, at that point I actually thought I had died, I really, really thought that I’m going to die at this point. I eventually did get back in bed, kind of back into me body and I went to bed but I was crying uncontrollably which is something I learnt as a child you don’t do because it’s a sign of weakness. And me wife asked me what was wrong but all I could say to her was, Why’ve you let me die on me own after all I’ve done for you. And she couldn’t understand what I was saying, and I got up the next day, and I had this obsession with lights, I had to put a fridge door on so there’s a light in there, me wife was begging me not to go to work but I did and, been a problem on a job and this guy was shouting down the phone so, I’d tell him to F off and put the phone down, and me business partner said, Pete you can’t speak to people like that in business And that’s, that was all he said and I hit him over the head with the telephone and I drove home and I curled up in this chair in the front room and e[h], and that basically was, was the beginning of the end really, I didn’t wash, I didn’t eat, I didn’t shave, I was locked in a world of voices, paranoia and depression, and eventually I was admitted to services and sectioned under the Mental Health Act which carried on for a period of about ten years.