I think, recovery is a very unfortunate word. I wish they’d chosen a different word because it causes such offence to people who don’t believe they will ever, if you like, get better again and there’s a misinterpretation about what recovery means. I think what is inspiring is saying that we all have our own journey to make and our own interpretation to make about what illness is. I think that’s really, really good. That’s liberating and allows us, especially with unconventional thoughts to feel secure in our thoughts and have then seen as valid and to look at our strengths and what we can bring to the world instead of looking always at the failure and the impairment is really good. Where I think it goes wrong is that it sometimes substitutes itself as being the voice for all users. Which I think is wrong. I don’t think it is and sometimes I think it becomes almost, almost a religion. If you don’t belief in recovery then you’re just misguided. You can’t have a valid disagreement with recovery. Everyone in mental health has to believe in recovery. But in many ways it’s a very diffuse subject. When you start talking about the recovery model of the design of a building you’re being really stupid because it just means what improves mental health and just saying recovery model is just rubbish. And there are too many people have a value base around recovery that says the only way to recovery is certain models like getting into employment or believing in this or being free of medication or whatever, which is a judgmental, patronising way of saying people should speak. There are people who have hardened themselves. What I think is wonderful about people with mental health problems speaking out is that we have a vast range of opinions and all of them are valid. From those people who believe medication and ECT is a life saving vital treatment to those people who believing sectioning is the greatest infringement of human rights, and there’s a vitality and breadth of wonderfulness is every one expressing those things which is great. And sometimes people who are caught in recovery think that there’s one way of thinking and if you don’t think that way, then you’re misguided, you haven’t educated yourself enough and if you just listen to the disciples of recovery you would have a guided sensible view. And that I find is really offensive. What I think is wonderful is giving that belief into people having a sense of their own journey and a sense of their own strength and a sense of their own worth. That’s, that’s where it should settle. Rather than thinking it’s concerned with everything else. And I think, you know, when services start talking about recovery focus that’s fine. But often it’s just a bit of a gloss. And everyone says, recovery, they say recovery without even thinking what it means sometimes. I found that quite offensive, because it’s just taken over. it’s become, I hate the word political correctness because it’s such a stupid thing, but it’s become a dogma and that’s really, really annoying because it’s a wonderful, wonderful liberating concept which is in danger of distorting voices and not voices to be heard, just in case they don’t agree with the concept.

I see the professionals. I see psychologists. I see all these. And they’re very good, but yes it’s believing in the world again is the most important thing and for me, since I broke up with my wife a lot of it is brand new. It sounds strange, but it feels like I’m learning what friendships are again for the first time. I’m learning how to be a friend with people. And that’s very confusing. And I’m trying to learn what I want out of life and I’m not very sure what it is. But a lot of it is very quiet. A lot of it is just the wonder of being in the world. I suppose because I was so close to not being in the world. Because, you know, I was saying earlier that when I was in hospital, my, my ambition was to find the beauty of being a spirit. And now I’m trying to find the beauty of being in the world. And, and actually learning to believe in myself as a person who has value to other people. And I haven’t succeeded in doing that. But to try to do it is wonderful. it’s really good. And sometimes it’s terribly, terribly lonely. And sometimes you feel that there is no one in the world that can connect with the experiences you’ve gone through. But I do have some wonderful people around me. You know, when we came in, you know, I was holding a friend’s baby. You know, what can replace that. You know, having a wee child, so trusting that they want to use their wee fingers to touch your nose and your, your chin and feel your mouth, is, you can’t replace that. it’s those are the important things. And they are what keeping me going rather thenwell I know drugs probably do keep me going in a way that’s different. But without that’s something to want to be a part of there would be no point in drugs in the first place.

I think, I think certainly in Scotland, I don’t know about England so much, we’ve learnt a huge amount over the years. I’ll give an example. In the early days when I worked in Edinburgh I remember one of our members and myself, for the first time we were invited to see a psychiatrist and in those days that was such an event. You know, we went to the café and we giggled for the whole afternoon, saying what is he going to say, will he this and will he section us and all this sort of stuff. We were terrified at seeing him, and we had no faith that he would actually listen to what we were saying and we were completely shocked when he agreed with some of the things we said. There was this huge barrier. Nowadays up here certainly Now, psychiatrists refer people to HUG. They see it as a good thing. And I think we’ve grown to realise that not everyone who gets involved in what you might call the user movement has to be anti professional. Or see it as a them and us thing. Even those of us whove had horrible experiences tend to think that the people who are doing it, even if we disagree with it, are trying to do the best. Most people have a very… a very good motivation and actually there is so much to do that we all agree on, whether we’re mental health officers, social workers, support workers, psychiatrists, planners, policy makers, that if we just joined together we could, we could do really wonderful things. And I think that’s really good, and that’s us growing up and not being so caught on saying that all the people are bad so therefore we’re victims because we just see everybody with suspicion. We’ve grown up to take responsibility for our own views and have become much better at finding out our views. In many ways, certainly in the Highlands we have more influence than some professional bodies. But equally it seems to me that people tend to respect our views. We’re not just a group of angry people saying I don’t like you because you did nasty things. We’re finding out our views of a lot of people and expressing a reasoned, rational, logical idea of what can help us, whether is from medication to employment to ward rounds, to benefits. And we’ve grown up to find that we’re gaining a voice as a community. A very disparate voice. A, a rainbow of all sorts of voices but a voice, and… it’s quite exciting. It’s very, it’s very exciting. Because that voice hasn’t been heard for so long and there is so much, quite apart from changing things there’s so much that needs to be remembered. As a whole, there’s a whole community whose experiences are… are only just being recognised and registered. And to me some of the basic things is just getting those voices, not stored, but… there, so that you grow a history I don’t know that’s… how do you express it? You know, I’m lucky, I’ve got a job, I’ve got a house, I’ve got friends. Some of our members have had horrible experiences. They’ve been in prison, they’ve been homeless, they’ve lost all their friends, they’ve lost their houses, they’ve had no say in what happens to them, they’ve had the horrible reactions of some of the people around them and they’re living on a tiny, tiny income. And it’s such an act to gain the dignity and the courage to say I’m going to speak out about this. Not just for myself, but so other people don’t suffer this way and so that I can say things that will help people in the future. And it will bind me to people who have similar experiences to others. It’s a courageous thing to do and it’s a dignified thing to do and sometimes it’s all you’ve got. And it’s really, really precious. No one can take your voice away from you, but they can silence it. And we’re lucky here that our voice isn’t silenced. Although we’re still a small group you know. In Scottish terms we’re seen quite big, we’ve got 400 members, most of whom have had quite serious problems. The highlands has a population of 200,000. So at least 50,000 people in the Highlands will experience mental health problems at some time in their lives. So we’re a tiny, tiny group compared to the constituency we should be seeking out. But it’s a start.

So I came back and it was a fairly sleepless night and we went to the GP the next day, and she again, sometimes they have got professionals that are superb and she was really, really good. She, she put me in a room on my own after I’d explained myself and by then, I was really quite inarticulate and articulate and my body was making all sorts of jerking movements. And she phoned the hospital and said I had to go there straight away. And by then it was sun shiny and every bright reflection was a spirit in my mind. So on the journey to hospital I was, I was hiding in the well of the car from spirits and we got to the hospital and I was seen by a psychiatrist quite quickly and in the room, he was interviewing me and then the phone rang and it was a person in huge distress. She was obviously suicidal and I immediately assumed that I was beaming evil thoughts down the phone and that I was causing her to be suicidal. So I ran from the room and hid in the courtyard. And a nurse came out and she was really nice. She was very calm and she just crouched near me and just encouraged me back in. And then I was admitted to hospital. And that was quite hard. Just because, you’re going into a large institution and you’re very distressed and you’re very confused and basic things like where you’re sleeping and how to eat and what all the other people are doing and whether you’re allowed to smoke or whether you’re not, was just bewildering. So… I just got very frightened and I spent most of the first day hiding under my bed. And occasionally nurses would gather round the bed and then give me haloperidol sort of to take which was horrible. And I didn’t want to take it and they were just saying I’d got to, because it was good for me. And yes, I was just obsessed with, with these evil spirits which I thought were changing my thoughts. Getting rid of the evil, and not touching anyone. I thought if I touched anyone especially those I loved they would be infected by evil. And I thought all I, the only thing I could do was to go to the woods and get rid of my blood. And it’s only about 6 months ago that I found out that I was sectioned then.

Even though you know intellectually that it’s there to keep you alive. It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like you’re being controlled and coerced and it’s not as though people do it in a nasty way, you know, the nurse who gives me the injection is always pleasant and she’s very good at giving me it, it doesn’t really hurt very much and the people who say I have to take my medication would be the mental health officer or the psychiatrist in a really nice way, I just don’t want to take it. I feel it pollutes the core of who I am. it’s a very strange feeling, like I feel that being on medication I’m false. And I know everyone says when you’re on medication you know, you’re rational, you’re not full of weird ideas, you can get on with people, you can cope with life. You, well you don’t always sleep, but you do better at sleeping than when you’re not. You look after yourself, but it doesn’t feel like it’s me. It feels like, I’m not an automaton, but just a shadow of what is me, and yet what is me is too horrible to think about. So part of me accepts that I have to take it. I just can’t willingly do it.

My Dad was in the Air Force so we moved around the country a lot, and then he started selling yachts. I lived on the South Coast. I went to a public school….I was quite a… separate child. But I had quite a good upbringing. In my teens and late adolescence I tended to say I had an awful upbringing but actually in retrospect it wasn’t too bad. I did a lot of climbing, a lot of sailing, a lot of walking. Depending on where we lived, we did different things, in Norfolk in was all kind of beaches with dogs and other schools it was walking along rivers and listening to punk music and trying to be rebellious and not really understanding what was happening, and just the general to and fro of growing up. You know, the sort of family moved around a lot.

And how did you get on at school with all this moving?

It varied. It was completely different in different places. It was quite a strange experience in the initial school I was extremely quiet. I was very confused by school and I didn’t really know how to participate. I would just sit there and do nothing. And it, I adapted to different places in different ways. When we lived in [place name], there was a whole group of us around the houses where we lived and where we, a horrible gang, did all sorts of things, smashing windows on a building site and all sorts of things and rushing round on our bikes and climbing trees and playing war games, and all the things that young people do. The next place I lived it was Norfolk and there we had almost no friends, initially anyway. And school was a complete mystery. I’d moved from one school where you wrote, the way we write nowadays, to Norfolk where you wrote with all these curly letters and things. And it was like a completely brand new alphabet and discipline was completely different. You got smacked if you stopped writing and stuff like that. So it was very strange and I just shut up there. And initially I made friends and then I stopped making friends and I spent most of the time in my memory hidden in an alleyway in the school. There was a boy with a hole in the heart, who had a blue, a blue face, and he sat at one end of the alley and stared into space and I would sit at the other end of the alley staring into space. And that was basically school then. But then I went away to public school and I wish I hadn’t, but initially, initially it was very hard, but I made a lot of friends there, and got very used to it, and it was a good place. There were lots of people I liked and got on with. I would have preferred not to have been away from home, but it was a place where there were people who I could get on with.

And what happened when you left the hospital?

Nothing much. I went back to university. What did I do? I was meant to see the doctor, so I would turn up to the doctor. And then I was meant to see a psychiatrist. And he was really weird. It was very strange. He must have been some arcane therapy, because I would go in and see him, and first of all we had a language barrier. We were from different cultures and he really didn’t understand much of my language. He had quite a poor grasp of English. So when I told him things he would get it wrong and I was quite inarticulate too, so it didn’t help him either. But he specialised in silence [laughs]. It was really weird. You’d go in and he’d say, How are you And I’d say, Fine And then he’d say, Yes And I’d sit there and he’d sit there and after about ten minutes he said, well, I’d be about ready to speak after ten minutes because it was really getting very painful by then. And then he’d say, Well that’s fine, I’ll see you in two weeks time And off I’d go again. So eventually I stopped going to see him, and then they sent someone down to make me come back to see him, but eventually I stopped seeing him. I carried on seeing the first doctor who was, who was good. He got very frustrated with me sometimes. You know, he would say, at that stage I had a personality disorder according to them and he would, he would do things, like saying he won’t see me if I carry on cutting myself and that would be really hard. And then if I phoned Nightlines or things like that when I was feeling suicidal they would phone the doctors because they would get worried and then he’d tell me off for doing it. But then after times he would say he could see me living in a rosy cottage in the future with children. And that seemed so unbelievable I would just laugh inside. But you know, eventually I did end up living like that for a time. And it was very good. And sometimes he would say I had to accept that life for me would always be miserable, because it would never be light and I had to get used to it, and that didn’t help. I think he was just frustrated. Because at other times he’d say, You know, it can be good But always when he left you, you’d just feel dejected. You’d sort of walk along with your heart on the floor saying, Why should I go and see him Even though he was trying to help he didn’t really know what to do. And may be there wasn’t anything to do.

I used to be clearer in my attitudes towards what we call mental illness. Now, I don’t know. I used to think a diagnosis was really, really useful. It was tangible, you could grasp it, you could either challenge or disagree with it or accept it. And it made sense of an experience that other people didn’t have. And now I almost reject the diagnosis because it feels like it defines you and it defines you according to other people’s values. And it can label you as a victim. You can almost conform to the stereotype of being a patient and what’s expected of you. You know, for the first time, all my life, you know, it’s now 27 years since I first came into mental health services and I never accepted I was a mental health patient, if you like, according to the stereotype. And now, you know, my, the people around me are wonderful who come and help me, but now I have no choice but people, if, if my nurse wants to come into my home, she’s got the right to. I can’t refuse it.

And it’s not that I’m different I just feel like a patient. I feel diminished. And part of feeling diminished means that I want to reject what they’re saying about me. And also I do really struggle with my beliefs. They’ve never completely gone away since I was out of hospital this, this time, so the feelings of evil are quite strong in me, but I’m very contradictory. I talk about spirits and evils and devils inside of me and yet I’m an atheist. So it doesn’t make any sense. But I don’t like to dismiss, even if it’s true that my beliefs are caused by illness, I think there are lots of ways of seeing reality. And in a different world we might not call that illness. We might just call it a different way of perceiving the world. And it’s, I don’t think illness is just a tangible thing. Illness is defined according to our society’s judgement about what is right and what is this and that. What is ill and what is healthy. And in some ways I live a very healthy life at the moment, but I’m seen as ill, and I’m seen as sort of severely ill.

I feel at my most easy when I meet someone who I realise has at some stage or still is going through some of the experiences I’ve been through. Or at least has some knowledge of what mental ill health is. It feels like there’s a connection. And you can share all sorts of ideas then and learn from each other. Even if that learning is not conventional learning it gives you all sorts of sensors of your own self-identity and self-worth. And that’s how I find things out. I don’t tend to go to leaflets. it’s strange because we’re the sort of people who would do leaflets and things but booksI quite like books, which give either fictional or real accounts of what people have been through. I find those very interesting.

But otherwise I don’t do a lot. I’m not caught on self-help and self-awareness and, no I don’t seek to be a person whose all about recovery. I just live my life and I live my life

And this was when I first went in psychosis. Basically I began to stop sleeping. And accompanying that I couldn’t stop thinking and for the first time in years the thought of self-harm became really prominent in my mind again. And I told my wife that that was what I was thinking. And we went to see a GP who made an emergency referral to a psychologist who was going to see me quite quickly to see if we could do something about it.

And then it’s really hard to describe what happens. I wasn’t, I was just thinking, and thinking, and thinking, and not relaxing and then everything inverted. And half formed thoughts became very real.

I began to think that… my blood had been poisoned by evil spirits and that I was evil, and that there were spirits around me, warping my thoughts and changing my thoughts, and that was very frightening and I didn’t know what to do with it.

And I think the worst thing I’ve ever done was one night when our son was in bed, and we were sitting down having a drink, I told my wife, that I had to go to the woods to get rid of the evil in my blood by cutting my wrists. And you know, it’s, it’s something that people don’t know how to respond to. So she just had to watch me walk out the door with razor blades.

And… I went to the woods and again I’m so glad I’m such a coward, because I didn’t do much. But what my wife must have gone through knowing that I could die and not knowing why I was doing it. It must have been terrible.