They said to me that there, there was a place that I could go, a women’s referral unit, and if I did, if I wasn’t going to go there voluntarily then they, they were going to section me. So of course I took, took the opportunity to put myself in, in, in somewhere voluntarily [laughing]. It seemed like a good idea. Not that I really knew an awful lot about mental health and the system that, before this happened. I just thought, ‘It’s better to go voluntarily than for someone to by law imprison you. Because to me it sounded like, ‘Well, if you don’t go, we’re going to lock you up,’ sort of thing.

So, yes, I went there. It was bizarre because they didn’t take me there. They sent a cab to get me and off I went in the cab, or was it an ambulance? I can’t even remember what it was now. I think it was an ambulance car thing. Anyway it wasn’t, I remember going there and thinking to myself that I might be, never be able to call myself normal again. And so therefore I just thought, ‘Well, all right then, I’ll just go along with it and see what happens, because I’m not mad. So it’ll be all right. And I got there [laughs] and this woman sort of took me up to a room and, after talking about whatever, I didn’t even hear any of it, I was kind of sitting there and they was going, ‘Ooh, and we’ll take you up to your room’ and took me suitcase. And this woman opened my suitcase and she was checking everything. Checking, you know, the toiletry bag, the side compartment, shaking out the clothes. And I’m looking at her and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why on earth are you doing that? You’re making me feel like I’m a prisoner. I said to her, ‘What do you think I’m going to have in my suitcase?’

‘Well, we’ve got to make sure you haven’t got any drugs or alcohol or things that you can harm yourself with or any pills that you shouldn’t have’ and blah, blah, blah. And I just sat there and cried because I couldn’t believe that I was there. And I didn’t remember why, I’d decided it was a good idea just to come there. And I just never spoke, for days I never spoke. And I saw all these people with lots of issues and I just looked at them and think, ‘You lot are mad, but there ain’t nothing wrong with me. You lot are the mad ones, because you’re behaving mad. At least I’m just sitting quietly. You’re carrying on. And I didn’t feel part of what was going on. I didn’t, I didn’t feel alienated neither, because there was another two black women there too. So, and there wasn’t many people there. I think there was about eight of us. So, and it was all women. So I had my therapies and classes and whatever else went on in there.

Let’s start with the women’s service. The, it was a very nice house, very well laid out and furnished etc. There was nothing in there that I could identify with as a black person that made me feel welcome. It didn’t make me feel like it was a familiar place, a necessarily welcoming place for me as a black person.

The staff were, I won’t say they’re indifferent, they just did what they did. But none of it emulated anything that I was familiar with. The food we ate was English food, unless we cooked and then it would be something different. It was predominantly tasteless, the cooking. The salt and pepper type cooking that nobody likes, but that’s what existed. Just a general feeling that, you know, when I was talking and, and started talking to people in my latter weeks, you know, I would, sit there and crack jokes and, and be quite animated and quite loud and, ‘Can you keep it down please,’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because you’re a bit loud,’ ‘But why do you want me not to be loud? Am I disturbing somebody?’ ‘No, but it’s a bit loud. ‘I don’t understand. What’s the problem?’ But that sort of thing. It’s just not taking into account that, you know, as a black person from the Caribbean you meet other people from the Caribbean, you’re cracking jokes based on maybe something that you identify that you have in common. Because a lot of the time in there you’re trying to make connections with people. Whereas before you was in there, maybe you weren’t able to make connections, and we did. And me and these two other girls, we spent a lot of time talking about common ground. And it was funny sometimes. And sometimes it got a bit loud. ‘But it’s daytime and we’re in the garden. What’s the issue, sort of thing? So, yes, it, that, that was strange. And also just generally there was nothing, no one to support you. They just, there was just lip service to the word support. There was no real support. There was no real tangible thing that you could take away that helps you to get on with your life or rebuild your life. And it wasn’t culturally sensitive. To, to say that, you know, ‘From a cultural point of view you may experience this. This is a good coping mechanism for this and this and this. And there was none of that, there was none of that. ‘Just get out there and sort yourself out,’ you know. There was none of that kind of help. And I do find that is still around now, you know.

Sometimes I have to come to work very late because I just can’t get it together in the morning. And it’ll be 11 oclock when I’ll get in to work, when I should have been here at 10. Or sometimes it will be 12.30. But I make sure the other end of the day I make up those hours. And that’s the reasonable adjustment that I’ve negotiated with my employers. Because it, it’s no good you trying to tell me, ‘You know you should be in at 10. It’s not going to happen. At certain times when my head is just not behaving, it’s not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen.

So, you know, I think that’s the other thing that keeps you like that. Because if you don’t address the fact that maybe you’re going to have trouble getting in on time, the more you get slow in the morning the more you panic. Because you know it’s getting closer to the time and you’re going to have to give them yet another explanation why you are not in yet. And because you don’t want to tell them the real reason, you have to find a reason to tell them. And it can get way too complicated. So it’s just easier to tell them, ‘Well, look, this is it, blah, blah, blah. So even now it’s got to the point where I’ve negotiated one step further. If I’ve had a bad night and I am up later than half past two in the morning, I will phone the office to say, ‘I’m going to be late. Because I know that those pills will not have worn off by 10 oclock. So I’m going to be late. And I won’t even be awake to make the phone call to tell you I’m going to be away, going to be late. So, you know, we’ve negotiated that. And that takes so much stress off my head. Because I can get up, and had a bad night and get up and it will be 11.30, 12 oclock and I can go to the bathroom, get washed and dressed and go to work. And no one’s looking at me sideways. I just phone to say, ‘I’m in now and guarantee I’ll be at work ’til 7, 8, 9 oclock sometimes. And I’ll just log out and everyone will see that I’ve made up my time. So, you know, where, where it was an issue, you’ve got to try and make things not be an issue in order for you to cope. And the only way for you to make it not be an issue is to tell the truth. ‘This is what it is. This is, this is the best that I can do at these particular times. And if that company or person or whoever it is can’t work with that, you’ve got to move on. Because no jobs worth it, no person’s worth it, for you to get yourself in such a state it affects your health. So, yes, that’s how I do it.

But in terms of working, as a person who has a mental health condition, I’ve been in my job three years now. The first year was quite easy. It was new, it was, it was fresh, it was building. I was so busy I hardly ever saw staff that I worked with because I was constantly out in the field talking to people etc, building the project. Coming up to the end of the year, then there were, there were problems, there were problems. I think I found it harder that somebody would personally attack me the way I am as a person than the work that I do. Nobody had any complaints about the work that I did, it was character assassination. And considering I took so long to build this perfect me that I was completely happy and contented with as a person, to have someone sit there and, and rip that to pieces, or attempt to rip that to pieces, was extremely disturbing for me. And it did cause me to really rethink, ‘Well, you’re not past it. You can become unwell again.

I’d actually thought that I’m past it. I’d, I thought, ‘Right, I’ve sorted that one. I’ve conquered that. It’s sorted. I take my little pills every day just like everybody else. If you had cancer or diabetes or whatever, you’d pop a pill. I pop my pill and I’m good. And then all this things started happening and I realised that my health was not so secure and in the bag, and I could become unwell if I allowed external factors to really get into my head. Because once they got into my head, all my voices just went bonkers. They had a field day. ‘See, it’s not only me saying it. Look, everybody else is saying it,’ sort of thing. So that was interesting. Becoming quite ill and having a lot of time off work was interesting in terms of how people viewed me. On returning to work, unlike most illnesses that you might get, part of my recovery was to do what I normally do. So I normally go to work, so, ‘Go to work. As opposed to you’re still not 100 per cent, so you stay home. But in order for me to recover I had to start doing what I normally do. Which involved coming to work, which involved coming to work in quite a doped-up state and not being as coherent as I normally am, and having people just ignore you, like you wasn’t even there. That people could actually come to your desk and pick up a piece of paper and actually do it as if you wasn’t there, was quite amazing to me.

That my place of work lacked a certain level of understanding. I mean we overcame it, but it was there. This desire for me not to be around because people didn’t know how to take me. So it would be better if I stayed at home until I was better. So once again, ‘let’s just tuck the mad person away because they’re making me uncomfortable’ type scenario. And I must admit, it didn’t help me to speedily recover, having to, to deal with that.

But I spoke to my manager about it in length, and we had to work it out. Because I thought to myself, at that point strangely enough it gave me the fight to recover, because it was an injustice. And one of my voices that are extremely strong cannot stand injustice. And she will kick my butt out of bed to try and effect change because she can’t stand it. And something forced me back into work and, and challenging negative behaviour and stigma and forcing people to fear, face up to their fears and admit their fears, so that it can be talked about. And we got over it. It didn’t happen overnight, but we did get over it. But it, it really did show me that, in 2006 as it was at the time, that these things are still going on. And you’d think that with all these equal opportunity this and DDA and everything else, that people wouldn’t dare behave in such a way. But they do, they do. And it, it was like, ‘My God. Wow. I can’t believe it. And number two, it’s actually happening to me. It wasn’t happening to somebody else, some

When someone comes in and they see something or feel something that is familiar to them, it helps them to feel comfortable and relaxed. And then your interaction with that person is better. They come away with something more. And this is what services don’t do. They don’t, it can be as, simple as a smell. I’ve had people come in here and, when they’re doing the training and the, and, and the caterer comes. And the caterer comes in and, and he brings rice and peas. And a man walked in, and he said, ‘Boy, smell like home. Do you know what I mean? Something as simple as that. We’ve had like things being cooked in the kitchen. And, and, and people, like this Indian lady, she came in and she goes, ‘I can smell it. And I said, ‘What?’ And she goes, ‘A tikka. And I go, ‘Oh, is it a nice smell?’ She goes, ‘Yes, it reminds me of my childhood. Do you know what I mean? It’s these little things that can make somebody feel like, ‘I actually belong here. They have some kind of insight into my world. And they appreciate it, moreover they appreciate it. And I think that’s what’s missing.
It’s hard, it’s not, don’t get me wrong, it’s not an easy thing to do. Because we spend an actual, quite a lot of money on trying to achieve that in the project. It’s costly, but it’s worth it. Because then that person, who may be Asian, Chinese, African, Jamaican, some kind, other West Indian country, wherever they come from, will go away with this really warm feeling about your service or your project, tell somebody else, that comes in, and it goes like that. Word-mouth is the best advertising you can do. I stopped advertising for my project a year ago. There’s no point. People just walk in off the street. ‘So-and-so told me. I don’t need to do it. People refer from the mental health service, OTs and doctors, GPs now, everybody. So you, you’ve got to let your reputation speak for yourself. And that’s by creating a service that you started, started thinking about everybody. You can’t think of every single human being, but you try and, and think of a service that says, ‘Okay, we’re going to create some catering for a, a particular group. We’re going to have a rota of catering where every time that we cater we make sure that we’ve got tea, coffee, hot chocolate, herbal tea. Right? Because a lot of older black people don’t drink tea and coffee. They eat, drink hot chocolate. And then some of them have ditched all of them. And they, they like their little camomile tea. The man tell me, ‘You got camomile tea?’ I said, ‘Yes, we have some camomile tea,’ you know. And, and it just makes them feel welcome, you know.

If you’re going to do some sandwiches, make sure you do some chicken and whatever and whatever, but give them a little hard dough bread with some cheese. Do you know what I mean? Put some samosas on the side. Put some, you know, satay chicken. Mix it and blend it as a norm. It’s not a special occasion. You know, don’t tell me you’re integrating people and you’ve got an integrated service because you have a Caribbean night. You’re still segregating people to one night. That means, ‘On that night I’m welcome, but any other night I’m not welcome.

So I had a counsellor, who was absolutely rubbish, who then told me about a BME counsellor, who was equally rubbish, who then led me on to another counsellor, who was excellent. And she was a white Irish woman and she allowed me to explore my feelings. I think that’s probably the best way to put it. She never actually ever said that much, I have to say. But when I started to feel some kind of understanding and recovery, I talked to her about what type of counsellor she was. And she said, she must have told me right at the beginning but I can’t remember, she said she was a person-centred counsellor. And I thought, ‘Wow. This is really, really good. Because for the first time in all the so-called care that I’ve had somebody is allowing me to make my own choices, come to my own conclusions. And they’re not telling me that it’s wrong or it’s right, they’re just allowing me to explore. And, and in some ways, you know, it’s so subtly, but forcing me to think things through. Never giving me the answer to the next step. Allowing me to think about what could be my next step and what’s the pros and cons of my next step and really thrash it out. And maybe, you know, there’d be one question for a session and, and that’s all we’d ever get to by the end of the session, just coming to grips with what the question was, sort of thing.

And I had counselling for nearly a year, every week, one hour, and it was fantastic. And she was a volunteer. So then I decided, ‘I’m going to be a counsellor. I’m going to be a counsellor. And I went off and found an Introductory and a Certificate too and I started this person-centred counselling. And it was probably the worst thing that I ever did, because being a person-centred counsellor requires you to look at yourself. And looking at myself was not always a good idea, because I often didn’t like what was revealed to me when I started really looking. So it was a struggle to finish this course. And I had lots of challenging conversations with members of that group, that training group. And the tutors were fine, but it was really hard work. So by the time I got to the end of the certificate I decided I didn’t want to be a counsellor, because if this is what the certificate feels like, God knows how hard the diploma is going to be. I don’t think my mind can take it. And all my friends would just have a field day. And I think they did have a field day with the whole concept of me delving into my head. I didn’t often do that.

It’s like what we say on the project, and it, it really is the ethos of, of how we work, ‘Stop seeing diagnosis. See people. It’s the bottom line. If you base your interaction with another human being on what somebody has said they are, you’re going to fail, you’re going to fail that person. Because you need that person to show you who they are. Then if you want to read what somebody said about that person when that person spent ten minutes in front of them six months ago, has got to say, then read it, read on. But don’t allow it to cloud your ability to see another human being. Okay, some people can be quite severely disabled by their condition and they can have quite extreme illness or, or, or manifestation of their illness, and I accept that. But still you need to see a person. Because I have people who get labelled as being disruptive etc and so forth based on the fact that they’re loud and they’re colourful and they’re quite overpowering. But that’s their personality. It’s not their illness. But then these traits are likely to be seen as people’s illness, not their personality. Not everybody’s the same. Just because somebody wants to wear seven different colours in their hair, that doesn’t make them antisocial or over expression of their self or whatever they want to say about that person. That just makes that person an individual, like to be an individual. If she had 10 million she’d be eccentric. No one would say that she was mad. They’d say she was eccentric. So it’s as simple as that. Just see people before you see diagnosis. Diagnosis was never designed for you to make a judgement on a person. It was designed to make a judgement on medication, not on people and, you know, what services they should or shouldn’t access.

You know, I’ve seen people come in my door who have got depression and who are on GP care and they’re far more disabled than someone whos registered to have paranoid schizophrenia. Do you see what I mean? It’s, the, it’s so fluid, it’s absolutely fluid. And the depths are unknown. It doesn’t matter which direction you go, the depths are unknown. So you can’t just decide because that says schizophrenia and that says manic depressive or bipolar or whatever it says. I mean schizoaffective disorder. Well, what the bloody hells that? I mean’ I accept it has been given to me.

I don’t often get a present, so I decided to take it many moons ago. But what does it mean? What does it really mean? It can mean near enough anything. It’s like a, a non-description as it were. Basically what it means is, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. But that’s fine if it helps people to understand me to a certain degree. But that isn’t me. That diagnosis isn’t me. And the amount of people now I’ve met whos got that diagnosis, I don’t know how we fit in the same box. I don’t know. Just based on what? You know, our experience of mental health has been different, medications are different, you know, walks of life, backgrounds, different, general temperament. It’s all different. But we’ve all got the same diagnosis. I was thinking of having a schizoaffective disorder party, and you have to bring your diagnosis for entry, make it special one day [Laughing].

But, yes, it’s, it, that, that is my constant message to mental health professionals, ‘Don’t see diagnosis. See people. Once you see people, you’re going to actually get a better interaction with that person. Because as much as you sit there as the professional, that service user can see what you think of them. Because your body language gives it all away, all away. The tone in your voice gives it all away. If you’re scared, it gives it away. If you’re full of yourself and, it gives it away. You just give yourself away. Because there’s one thing you learn to do as a mental health service user is rea

I suppose really’ [sighs] I wanted to just say that it doesn’t matter what you’re experiencing, there’s going to be someone else whos having that same experience. It may not be in the exact same time zone or entire way, but there’s someone. Because I thought I was quite unique, in a horrible way, but unique all the same. And over the last five years I have discovered that I am absolutely just a number of people whove had similar experiences, come through life, you know, dealing with things the way I have, ended up in the mental health system, you know, done the rounds, you know, dragged themselves up and started work and still living and breathing it. I’m not, I’m not that unique. There is always somebody out there whos going through the same or similar as you. And that it doesn’t matter how hard it seems, it actually can be overcome. You just have to want it, want it more than it’s, more, more than anything. Because it’s actually easy to stay in the mental health system, because nobody expects anything of you. You can just sit there and vegetate. Because it, it’s a lot easier. It’s boring, but it’s easier than fighting and clawing your way back up and standing up and saying, you know, ‘I might have mental health, but I deserve respect like everybody else. And I am a member of society who has the right to go where I please and, and do as I please like everybody else. It’s harder to do that, but it’s way more rewarding.

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.