I hadn’t had a lot of help you know. this service is okay in the fact that, you know, there is some help but I don’t get any other help from anywhere else, I don’t, well I don’t want a psychiatrist anyway and I don’t want a CPN either because I just feel that sometimes they, they do things behind your back, they’ll write things down about you and you don’t know about it and you’re merrily going along thinking well everything is okay and it’s not, you know, from their reports.

And that can do you a lot of damage when you do find out and you think, well, who can I trust? And they say well okay it’s because you’re mentally ill, you’re just making this into a big thing. Well if it’s, if they know you’re mentally ill they shouldn’t be putting you in that position anyway where you’re thinking, you know, those paranoid thoughts. So yeah I don’t trust them and I haven’t, as I said I haven’t had a lot of help over the years. I did, on and off I’ve seen different psychiatrists but to me they always feel, they, it’s always felt like they’re sitting on a pedestal, you know, or they’re putting themselves on a pedestal and I’m just there as part of, well as part of their job really, you know, and so whatever they say goes and who am I to argue with them? And I think well okay I could do without that, you know. And part of it is getting a good doctor, if you haven’t got a good doctor then you’re in a lot of trouble, you really are. But I, I have good doctors and I can go, women doctors and I can go there and actually sit down and talk to them if I’ve got a problem or whatever and I’ll feel like I’m being well look after by my practitioner. But I can say that I haven’t had a lot of help from, apart from coming here to [mental health organisation] from any other mental health teams at all, you know.

Since I brought pills from HK in 1988, I, I would still go to the hospital for regular check-ups. But again they would only ask me whether I took the medication, what time I get up, what are my daily activities, do I feel suicidal. Asking all these questions was not what I felt I needed. What I needed was to solve my marital problems; I need to know why my mind is not functioning properly. I need to solve these problems. But seems I didn’t get any answers from them and was I left very disappointed. By end of ’94, no matter how often I take the medicine I didn’t seem to get any better. My mind might have one feeling at the park and another feeling at home and another on the street. I couldn’t work out which of these was my mind’s true feeling. So I thought it best to go home and sleep. Because of this, my husband accused me of being lazy and not wanting to work. All this added to my stress. After a while, I quit taking the pills and didn’t see the doctor anymore. I found out later I had anemia, so I went to see the GP again, I was told a normal level should be 13 but I only reached 6. There was a volunteer who went with me, I think he was a psychology student. He translated to the doctor that my mental and physical health was not very good and I looked very pale. The doctor said I was alright and that it was nothing. Then I felt that the doctor completely failed to make an effort in understanding my situation and making a proper diagnosis. This added to my reluctance to see the GP further. Finally by 1994, I gradually took less and less medication and finally didn’t take any medication in the end. I went to Healthy Living Centre and said I would like to change to a Chinese doctor and luckily they managed to find one for me. For the first few times that I saw the new doctor while not taking medication, I began to feel better, but after a few more appointments, my problems resurfaced.

After I left hospital, I would still have regular appointments to the outpatient’s service at a psychiatric hospital all the way up until 1998. Out of all the doctors I’d met up to that point, I felt there was one doctor who really helped me. He wouldn’t just ask standard questions regarding my medication and such, but really tried to get a deeper understanding of me. He asked me to partake in activities at my local community centers but I told him I couldn’t because of mind’s problems- the doctor seemed very understanding of this. I mentioned to him about my son’s study, as he may have been affected by my marital problem. The doctor helped to write a letter to my son’s school, so the school could have a better understanding of his situation and could assist him. Whether or not the school managed to help my son is another matter, but at least the doctor had done his part. I also told him about my marital problems; I wasn’t happy, I couldn’t apply for benefits as I was still living with my husband and my mental illness had always been a strain between us. Because of my issues, he very willingly helped me send letters to benefits and family counselling services. The letters were helpful, as those services later contacted me along with the help of a Chinese association. Even though I didn’t get anything out of it as they didn’t contact me further, at least the doctor did his job responsibly and didn’t just repeatedly ask Did you take your medication? He tried to understand and help in other areas affecting my life. In all my years of seeing different doctors, that was the only doctor that did so. All the other doctors just asked me the same questions about my medication, diet, sleeping patterns, and daily activities. There was a very big difference.

And do you see a psychiatrist or?

I see one every two months Yes, he’s quite good actually. He is I didn’t like him at first because I thought he looked like a banker [Laughs]. But he proved to be really kind of good, you know, supportive. I mean he’s really helpful, with, you know, me preparing to go to university. He’s making sure I get all the support I need from the university. So, you know, he has been good. Yes.

Are they white, your Mental Health Team?

My psychiatrist is white. My nurse, she’s a Black woman It’s the Mental Health Team is reflective of the kind of ethnic, the ethnicity of the area I am in, which is really good actually. So there is a mix of white, Black and Asian professionals, you know.

Do you think it matters?

It does matter. Hugely it matters, you know.

In what way?

It’s just you just feel more at home really, if I mean, for example, when I was growing up, we lived on a kind of really hugely racist street. So and that made me at times too scared to go to school, and, you know, and I’d be surrounded by teachers asking me why was I scared. They were all white, they had no, any kind of understanding of where we were coming from saying, you know, we were too scared to go to school, because there were certain people in the street who would swear at us, or spit at us. They just, they hadn’t been through the experience. They would try to argue You know, their argument that it’s not so bad. You know, people aren’t that bad and stuff like that, yes. It’s just I think every Black person in this country has experienced some racism unfortunately

It’s a very huge, sort of tricky subject actually. But to me it just feels nice that there is a nice of, not only ethnic backgrounds, but ages and kind of sexualities and it, all, you know, all that really is helpful, you know. Because I mean, how could I relate my life to what, for example, a white middle class, professional male, when my, my, my experience has been the total opposite, you know. That he’s in a very empowered position, not really understanding what it is to be disempowered. You know. So it, it just closes the gap between service user and professionals if there is, you know, you know, other kind of other ethnicities and kind of other ways of life, you know, in. So it just closes a gap and the gap needs closing you know?

To be honest, you know, my psychiatrist he’s white, my mental health, she’s white, every single professional Ive worked with the majority of them are white and every single one of them have helped me, every single one of them have wanted me to recover. If, if it was a racist white person what would they have done, sectioned me, Oh he’s, he’s an Asian guy let’s section him, that’s what we need, we need coloured people in the system that’s what we need. But they didnt section me, why didnt they section me? I’m, I’m from an ethnic minority background, why wasnt I sectioned? Huh? Surely we are a disappropriate number in the service, surely we should be sectioned so why wasnt I sectioned, I’m a coloured person. then, you know, what theyll say, theyll say basically the reason why you, theyll try and make up a number of sort of defence arguments and it wouldn’t add up because they know that there’s no argument against it. I’m like one of them, I’m an ethnic minority, I’m from a coloured background, so why didnt they section me? They had grounds to do it but you see it’s, they want to live in a, a world that they see everything as racist, everything has to be racist and unless everything doesnt go as they want to see it it’s racist and that’s what I don’t like

The thing is people always say you need to have an Asian man support you, you need to have an Asian man be next to you to be your advocate, why do I need that? I don’t. What will, I don’t understand what the difference is between a white person supporting and an Asian person supporting. It’s like theyre, you one is sub-human and one is human and [laughs] and it’s true, and, and theyre two different kinds of people and they cant do the same thing. It’s like because of their race they have to be different somehow. I think it’s not true, I think that the support I received from white members of staff has been the same I have received from Asian members of staff and Ive had Asian people that have supported me in terms of the mental health system.

Ive had a, you know, my psychiatrist Ive had three psychiatrists because one had, theyve all had to move on to different areas of psychiatry and etcetera but one, my first one was an Asian guy, my second one was a, I think he was , yeah I think he was a Jewish guy and the third guy the now, now, actually Ive ahead four, the third guy was a Chinese guy and the fourth one is an Englishman and Ive had a broad range of people and all of them seem to have the same belief that they want to see me recover and do well.

But yes, I just, I don’t always think that middle class people can understand like, oh and, you know, white middle class people can understand. I mean for instance, like they would not understand Asian culture. And things like, you know, like in Asian culture it’s kind of like you don’t talk to people outside the family. You know, you don’t let them know things, it stays in the family, andI don’t know, I think they, they are looking at things from what is normal from a white middle class person’s perspective. And what might be normal for them will not necessarily be normal for me. You know, I mean for instance in this culture it’s very much kind of individualistic, sort of go-getting thing, whereas in other cultures it might be more sort of collective community that’s more important. I mean for instance like just giving an example, I don’t really have very much ambition and in this culture that matters, because we are kind of brought up to achieve and succeed and have a career and be successful, whereas if I was growing-up in, I don’t know, an African village or something, it would be fine for me to just, I don’t know, you know, gut fish or something for a living and I’d still be part of the community and valued. I don’t know, I just

And there was this woman there and she was loud and she often called me, ‘Darkie’ and things like that. She was a lot older, you know, the old school type mentality. And because I never spoke a lot, there wasn’t the defence from the staff that I would expect, until a nurse heard it and [sniffs] she addressed the person’s behaviour. But up until then it was just a given, ‘Well, Jay don’t speak anyway, so it doesn’t matter if you call her whatever you want to call her. Or maybe that person was doing it to see if they could get me to talk. I don’t know. But that was, that was particularly horrible.

I think the, the experience of being part of the day service care in [the area] was discriminatory against women, against black people. There was nothing. I, I, I just, I went to the day centre and I just thought, ‘Why am I here? There’s nothing that interests me. There’s nobody here who I can identify with. There’s no activities that I’m vaguely interested in. There’s nothing. So why am I here?’ But, you know, I kept getting calls and, ‘You’ve got to come, and you’ve got to come, and you’ve got to come. And so I just kept going because I was told to go. And, you know, I was, I was in that mindset where I’d just do what people told me to do. Because I thought, ‘Well, perhaps they know better.

To experience bereavement is different from actually saying it. I never thought I go through bereavement until happened to me. Yes. It just gets hold of you, you can’t shove it off, it’s a hard thing. Causes a lots of mental health problems, bereavement, loneliness, social inclusion. Being in your flat on your own. Not having no work. Unemployed. No money to buy a proper meal. There are loads of people out there in the community. Loads in the community like that. But they don’t know where to go to no one. They don’t go to a doctor or no GP. They want to deal with it themselves. It’s called Breaking the Circle of Fear. Which is something by the Sainsbury Centre in mental health has brought out a paper. You know, some Black folk they don’t want to go to the GP, they don’t want to go, then them’s not treated, because the stories they hear about the system, so we’ve got to find a way to make it more attractive to help them to go and get treatment before it gets worse. All these things because of the way how the system is. And the GP, oh they have no clue about mental illness. If you go to them about any major problem, they look into the book, any tablets they can give you. Oh.

I never believed in psychiatric, that’s the thing. I always, I think this is probably the culture that I’m brought up in, that is basically first of all mental health is a taboo issue, secondly it’s, it’s always when you hear about patients who are mentally ill, they always seem to go to doctors like ten years, for ten years, or five years, or you know, they have been a mental patient for life. They have chronic depression for the past twenty years, so, like they never tend to get fixed like other diseases. If you have a problem with your appendix you go to the surgeon and he takes it out. But if you have a mental problem it’s like you take the medicine for the next twenty years, you know? That’s, that’s absurd. So I think that sort of made me stay away from psychiatrists.

But anyways, since I’ve been here in my college, I came here to do my MSc at University of [name removed], and over there, there was quite a bit of awareness about mental issues. So I used to read all these pamphlets and this and that, depression, everyone suffers from depression, one in three persons feel anxiety blah blah blah. So, you know, that sort of made me a bit more confident about, ‘Okay, so I’m not alone and, you know, it might not be such a taboo issue’ and you know. But I didn’t seek help back then.