Advocacy and the MWC

Autism Strategy Collaborative Business Meeting & Workshop 2019

Autism and Advocacy

Advocacy and the Mental Welfare Commission

My name is Graham Morgan, I work for the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland and am going to try to talk about advocacy and its links with the Commission.

First of all a bit of background, I have the very worst of all job titles, I am the Engagement and Participation Officer (lived experience) at the Commission.

In more meaningful language I am meant to involve people with autism, mental illness, learning disabilities, acquired brain injury and dementia in our work.

That may sound like a very boring job indeed, but I love it; I travel the length and breadth of Scotland meeting advocacy groups and support groups to discuss how they and their friends and family are treated. One day I might be in Mull talking about such things as freedom and the right to life, the next I might be in Dumfries talking about seclusion and stigma and the next up in Inverness talking about advance statements and our rights when in hospital.

It is a lovely job, I meet lovely people, have fascinating conversations and use the results of those conversations to try to make a difference for people.

In fact I am here under slightly false pretences, I am here to talk about advocacy and the Commission but I am hoping this talk will be sufficiently good for some of you to invite me to your meetings occasionally, if you have groups and meetings that I could attend, that is.

Until 3 years ago I had spent 25 years of my life working in advocacy, originally in Edinburgh where I helped establish a variety of mental health collective advocacy groups and a peer advocacy project and then later on up in Highland where I initially helped develop an advocacy strategy and worked to set up HUG (action for mental health) which is a collective advocacy group for people with a mental illness and also with People first Highland which is a collective advocacy group for people with a learning disability, we also did some work with the Autism Rights Group Highland which some of you might have heard of.

Collective advocacy is such a horrid word when the reality is so much more vibrant and dynamic. I got involved in advocacy because of my own experience of mental ill health and later diagnosis of schizophrenia. My experiences in psychiatric hospital 35 years ago inspired me to want to work with other people like me to try to create a better world for people with a mental illness. I started off with helping develop user run services for young people with a mental illness but moved into collective advocacy when I moved to Scotland in my twenties. I do not know how it is for your community but in mine we have often felt excluded and alien, we have often been isolated and lonely. We have struggled to find work and occupation and have been subject to prejudice and discrimination for many, many, generations. So when we started speaking to each other and realised that if we wanted change to occur for our community; our friends and peers and acquaintances that it would have to come from us. There was something hugely liberating in this.

By speaking to each other and sharing our experiences we gained some sort of bond and connection, by finding out what we thought would benefit our community we educated ourselves and by doing the actual speaking out; linking together like a trade union of people with similar conditions and experiences, we found we could make a difference. We found we could be listened to and we could change policies and services and attitudes. Doing such things and using different methods to get our voice heard; be that in reports, on film, in speeches, in the media or even in poetry and painting; we were able to flourish, we gained in confidence and found we had value and things to give.

I loved all the years I worked in advocacy and still love the voluntary work I do with HUG. It gives me a sense of belonging and stops me having to carry that mask of normality that so many people feel they need to present to the mainstream world, having the chance to be me amongst like- minded people has made such a difference to my life.

The Mental Welfare Commission has a strap line of promoting and upholding the rights of people with mental illness, learning disability and ‘related conditions’, which includes autism. We visit hospital wards, we carry out investigations, we carry out themed visits on specific subjects and with specific communities, we have an advice line, we monitor and influence the legislation that applies to us and we produce good practice guides among other things.

From our point of view having access to people in advocacy and support groups is invaluable to us. We try to centre our work around the lived experience of people so when we visit local advocacy groups, which I am always doing, we pass on issues raised by them about the local community and hospital to the practitioners who cover that area. Lived experience is central to many of our reports and publications for example our current themed visit on people with an eating disorder has been based on finding out the priorities of people with eating disorders before the visit even starts advocacy groups have been invaluable in helping us meet people with that experience just as they have as we develop policy and guidance around our rights and about the legislation that allows for our detention and compulsory treatment.

Individual independent advocacy is vital to our work, it goes both ways. I have very rarely used advocacy in my own life but I hear people talk about the difference it makes to know there is someone in your corner helping you get heard; how it evens out some of the inequalities, helps give structure and safety to what you want to say. The connection with the Commission works in a number of ways – I have heard advocacy workers say how helpful it has been to phone the Commission with their clients to get advice on more complex matters and how helpful that advice can be but equally I know that we rely on local advocacy projects – in the Commission we are about rights but so is independent advocacy.

Sometimes locally based advocacy projects have more time and knowledge and capacity to deal with some issues than we do. We have roughly one practitioner covering each health board area while there are usually a number of advocacy workers in each health board area.

The last area where there is a connection between the Commission and advocacy is that we have broad duties under the current mental health act to monitor the provision of advocacy across Scotland, this is a relatively new duty which we are getting used to and at the moment means keeping an over view of the planning for advocacy in each health board area. As part of that we would be very happy to learn of changes in advocacy planning or approach as they develop, hopefully having this national perspective will alongside the work of the Scottish independent advocacy alliance help safeguard the provision of advocacy which is one of our rights under mental health legislation.

To be honest I find talking about the theory and practice of advocacy a little boring but my heart swells when I see a member of an advocacy group standing up in public for the first time ever to give a speech, or to see the smiles of a group of people happy at the evaluations of the awareness training they have just carried out or the moment of recognition when someone sees a sentence they said at a meeting repeated in a report and feels good about it or even better those times when members of advocacy groups take time off of changing the world and go out together socially for a drink or a walk or to the cinema or in between meetings sit down to eat together and to witter and laugh together. That to me is where the value rests knowing you are making a difference and finding that sense of community and belonging when before you felt that you had nothing.

For more information on the Mental Welfare Commission visit : https://www.mwcscot.org.uk/