Highland Senior Citizens Network /Age Concern
Kingsmills hotel Inverness
13 september
Annual meeting
Graham Morgan – Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland
Our mental health
Hello everyone
Thank you so much for having me here.
I turned sixty this year. Which was a great shock; I don’t know why. I suppose when I was a child, being sixty signified someone very old indeed. Now I am not so sure. I live with Wendy and her young children and very much doubt I will ever be able to retire considering the pension I am likely to get.
I feel young in my mind but must admit life has caught up with me. I now see my GP monthly. We monitor my blood pressure, my drinking, my eyesight and sugar levels. It worries me a little and makes me remember my Mums advice that I need to stay healthy if I am to continue to help support our relatively young family.
I have always resented that advice but now that I have eaten far too many quorn sausages and hard boiled eggs, too many noodle soups, reduced the amount I drink each night and not had enough fish and chips by far, I have noticed my blood pressure has come down and I have, for me, lost a lot of weight and find it has also made me slightly happier, slightly more alert than I used to be. I hope this new health kick, with the encouragement of my doctor and my mental health team will carry on indefinitely.
I better introduce myself. My name is Graham Morgan, once, many years ago, I worked up here with Highland Community Care Forum and then with SPIRIT advocacy with HUG (action for mental health) and People First Highland. I lived in Kingussie, Carrbridge and Nairn and still miss the friends I made over the twenty years I was here.
I have been asked to talk about mental health and about mental illness and about being older.
My only qualification for this is that I have been diagnosed with Schizophrenia for the last thirty years or so and have been treated compulsorily for it for the last thirteen years which makes me know very well what it is like to have a mental illness but not so much what it is like to be mentally healthy.
Having said that, my last ten years with my partner, her twelve year old twins and Dash the dog and the rabbits have shown me the delight of a life that I did not know could exist.
I am also a writer and have done a variety of consultancy work as well as being an activist speaking out with others about our lives with a mental illness but I have a main job that I do which is that I work for the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland which is all about the rights of people with a mental illness, personality disorder, dementia, learning disabilities and autism.
Most of my life has been spent among people with a mental illness; learning about their lives and what might improve them. I hope to learn some more from you today about wellbeing, illness and being older if you are willing to talk about it after my talk.
We do all sorts of things in the Commission and I am very happy to talk to any of you afterwards about it, if you would like. Maybe the main thing to say is that we have a free advice line for people with lived experience and their carers on any issues to do with care and treatment which is open on weekdays and staffed by nurses, social workers and psychiatrists.
I hope from that introduction; you will realise that I am not a professional expert on these issues but I have lived some of them and feel very privileged to share some of my thoughts and experiences with you. There is no reason at all for my views to be seen as better than yours or more informed and I am more than happy to be challenged on anything – but ideally after I have finished this speech!
When I left my wife about thirteen years ago I found myself living alone in a tiny house. Although I had friends around me, I was incredibly lonely and I was frightened of the future. I couldn’t conceive of living again in an intimate relationship and assumed that over time I would grow more and more isolated and increasingly frail. That didn’t happen and I am so grateful for that.
My Dad died about three years ago. He was 84, his Parkinson’s was getting worse and worse but it was a heart attack he died of. I think he was also developing some dementia and may have been slightly depressed.
It is traditional nowadays to say older people are so independent and proud that they do not seek help until way past the time when things have become terrible indeed.
In some ways I can see that; in the latter years of my Dad’s life, my Mum had to spend nearly all of her time caring for him. He was a big opinionated man and she, compared to him, relatively tiny, he didn’t want anyone else to look after him and didn’t want to end up in a care home and refused to say what he would like to happen when he stopped being able to make decisions for himself; saying he was sure we would all do the right thing by him; which was very frustrating. It was only later on that I started coming down to them more often to visit so my mum could get the occasional break with the rest of the family, away from what had become an exhausting life.
He died just before the pandemic started and my mum stayed alone in a relatively big house. I phoned her every evening but that is nothing at all like having your partner in a seat next to you when the nights are drawing in. She sometimes tells me that it can get lonely and sometimes my brother or sister ask if she will come and live with them before there is an urgent need to. I am quite proud of her stubborn insistence on staying in her house. She has many friends where she lives; most within walking distance. She does voluntary work, gardens, walks everywhere and still swims in the sea at 85 which is more than I do. She has lived in that house for maybe forty years. It is where she belongs, where her community is, where she is connected; where she knows everyone.
For me, key to our mental health is to feel a sense of belonging and maybe she would find that with one of us but I worry that a new strange community with the need to make new friends at the same time as becoming less mobile might, instead of being a lovely thing to do, may at the moment, be a place of dislocation and isolation despite our best Intentions. Witnessing my parents lives, I have become aware of and alarmed at how difficult it can be for some people as they age. My mum is more stoical and I think happier than me but I am so used to hearing that one of her friends has died or another is now in a nursing home or another can no longer get out of the house or is in hospital. To me, from the outside, it sounds like a place where we may suffer more than people realise. Losing people dear to us can be awful and I cannot imagine what it is like to constantly have to mourn those we have loved.
We sometimes stereotype different communities and it is rarely a good thing that we do that but the more I see of people from an older generation the more impressed I am. I like the positivity and the fortitude in their refusal to complain about sometimes awful situations some of the people of my parents age are in. It may be something that spites our own self, but when my dad came out of hospital the last time, I was impressed that he refused his stroller, insisted on having a drink even if he shouldn’t, insisted on being him even though being him was often unhealthy. I liked that thrawn insistence on his own sense of dignity and his right not to be sensible at all.
When my dad died I had no idea how I would react and for around a year I didn’t and then on the anniversary of his death, I found I couldn’t work anymore. I had hit a brick wall and just lost the energy or will to do anything. Luckily I had a sympathetic GP and a helpful psychiatric nurse and a helpful manager at work who persuaded me to sign myself off of work rather than resign from my job. Time and having a partner who encouraged me out to do things like eat lots of cheese toasties in café’s, walk by the sea and talk to her was wonderful.
I have been particularly lucky this way. Having had a mental illness for most of my adult life the idea of getting help, whether that be through someone to talk to or by taking medication has made such a difference and has carried no shame with it, though I must admit I can struggle with the talking bit.
Something similar happened when I left my wife over a decade ago now. I was already diagnosed with schizophrenia but the loss of contact with my son and the circumstances of my separation sent me into hospital again. On getting back to my small house I was blessed to have the support of my psychiatric nurse. On one hand she made sure I took my medication but on the other she introduced me back into adult life. In my marriage, I had somehow forgotten the knack of making friends and lost confidence in my ability to not only speak to people but to buy myself the right clothes or get people to work on the house. She, alongside new friends in my life, helped me live independently and cope with life again. I had people who would help me choose new clothes from the charity shops and people who would ask me if it was really the case when I thought everyone at an event I went to hated me and did not want me there and by and by life became better and kinder.
Having said that not everyone has a nurse to introduce them back to life and not everyone has friends who will look out for them and make sure they socialise and encourage them to look after themselves but for me such help was the only way I managed. It is so patronising of me to say this to you when I think of the purpose of your organisation but I think that the older we get the more invisible we can get and the more isolated and lonely we can get. When we combine this with the pressure being older sometimes has on people’s minds and bodies, I can see how there is a need to speak up and point out that many of the issues you face are fundamental human rights issues – that everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and that dignity includes connection and belonging and community and the help we should all offer each other as a matter of course, even when we hesitate to ask for it.
I am going to speak of a few things that have helped me which may apply to some of you even though I imagine most of you are old enough to be my parents.
I have been involved in mental health services for all my adult life: hospital, medication, and professionals have probably kept me alive when I don’t think I should be alive. They have given me a bedrock to learn to live a life I am usually glad to have.
It is, I think, silly just to say ‘If you are struggling ask for help.’ For a start I never do when I am struggling; it is always someone else who notices I am not coping and makes sure that help is there for me. Also, sad to say, for many people who need help and who doubt the next day will be any better than the last one; sometimes our services are so pressed that people who need and deserve help like anyone else do do not get it. But, if you struggle, it can sometimes be worth it to recognise your right to support and comfort and your right to health care for body or mind.
Despite having nurses and psychiatrists and social workers in my life and even though I varied in how welcome I made them when I moved to Argyll, nearly ten years ago, to be with my new family, I struggled to make new friends and missed hugely those people who I thought ‘got me’ when I lived in the Highlands. My mental health team suggested that I go to Jeans Bothy; a community wellbeing hub for anyone but often for those who had experienced some sadness in their lives. It’s easy to say; “If you struggle and such a place exists in your community, try it out.” It is not as easy as that. I knew full well it could help me but it took me a full year before I felt comfortable enough to spend more than five minutes in the building but now it is somewhere I love to go to and is often a place where I laugh and feel free to be me. I go to the photography group and the writing group. I write for their newsletter; have been sailing and walking with them and feel it is my place. It is a safe place to be me and with people who understand, who I didn’t think I would find when I first moved here.
I do not know if this applies to many of you but I don’t like to feel needy or demanding, I don’t like to ask for help and often doubt I really need it. Luckily for me, on many occasions, people have not only reassured me that I can get help but have told me that I have a right to it and will likely benefit from it and that has been incredibly helpful. I will give an example.
I think all of us probably go through things we find hard to speak about or come to terms with and sometimes as time passes we doubt the help we can get or the usefulness of help for events that happened decades ago. About eight years ago I wrote to my old school about the harm one of the teachers had done to me when I was a child there fifty years ago and maybe four years ago the police contacted me over that letter. Maybe a year later I was sent a flier about Argyll and Bute Rape Crisis at my work. To my astonishment I found out that they saw men too and that they dealt with events that had happened years ago as well as in the present and that they also dealt with domestic abuse. When I contacted them, I was sure that they would dismiss me and see me as asking needlessly for support. I knew that I had been hit and spat at in a past relationship but didn’t really call it abuse, in fact I thought it was my fault and I knew that what the teacher had done to me would nowadays be seen as abuse but I thought it wouldn’t have in the past.
Approaching them was one of the best things I have ever done for myself. First of all they didn’t dismiss me. They were there for me, they took me to the point when the trial of my teacher was abandoned because he no longer had capacity to be tried and carried on helping me beyond that. They helped me with the guilt I felt at bearing witness to what an old and sick man had done to me. And with the domestic abuse I experienced, they listen and are patient. I cried when I first went through the door but nowadays I don’t and find they are used to me avoiding the subject and do not get cross about that. There are no obvious goals or targets. I don’t have to perform or achieve. They are there for me and make me feel good and valued.
I had been asking for help from the NHS for many decades with some of the things that happened in my past and found to my surprise that an organisation I had assumed would be deeply suspicious of men helped me more than I have been helped by any other organisation.
I do apologise for being patronising but sometimes there are things from the past we cannot let go and sometimes our present is not that good either and although it would be silly to say an organisation or person can take away all the pain we have had or are in, they can sometimes help if we reach out them.
I am going to say just a few more things. First of all, we are always being told it is good to talk. I resent that hugely and never respond well when friends who have witnessed me plunging into a state of distress that means I need to be in hospital say to me, “Next time remember I am here for you” Because sometimes I don’t want even my friends to listen to me: to speak of intimate things is difficult and needs trust and for some of us that is difficult. But recently, I watched a program which was about an event that nearly devastated our family and has left a lasting legacy. While I watched it, I wanted to cry and also I felt very angry. I definitely didn’t want to talk about my feelings, in fact I didn’t want to talk at all, but at the same time wanted a great big hug I knew I couldn’t accept. I went to bed upset and sad but in the morning, Wendy my partner, asked me about the program I had left early and I found I wanted to talk to her and it was a huge relief. I didn’t talk for long but to have someone I trusted, listen and acknowledge that something was awful was a liberation. It lifted my mood and meant I went upstairs to work in a happier mood that I had been in for some time.
Some of you will most definitely have had or do have a mental illness, who you speak to about it or even if you speak to anyone about is entirely up to you. I know there is still a stigma about it, especially illnesses such as mine of schizophrenia. I am possibly more open about my experiences than many people would ever want to be but I have almost never had a negative reaction when I talk about it. True when there is a negative reaction it can be devastating but the norm tends to be interest and connection and very often the realisation that the person or people I have been talking to have been through related experience. For me that is wonderful. It makes me feel less different and less odd and creates a bond between me and others.
My very last thought is a throwaway one. Sometimes I can find that I get worked up about an issue at work. It just takes me over and, sometimes when I am not cautious or sensible, I send out a wild email which I always regret. Luckily I have learnt to apologise for such things and even more luckily I have some people around me who, far from getting angry with me, often compliment me and are often kind to me. Whilst I said earlier that belonging and connection are important for mental health; I think just as important is kindness and love and sometimes forgiveness; not only from those we love but those we routinely encounter in our lives.
I think that is especially important when we seek help for the intensely personal. It can be hugely frightening and delicate and embarrassing and when we reach out anxiously for help and when we are met with warmth and a healthy type of love as well as an understanding of what might help us, that can make all the difference. My personal ambition is for this to be the norm; for everyone who gives us help; to treat us with warmth and kindness without ever questioning why they do that, it is just what you do with your fellow humans.
I think we have about thirty minutes for discussion. We have some questions we would really, really, like you to give us some views on but first of all do you have anything you would like to say or to ask about what you have just heard? Do spend a minute talking to the person next to you about what you have heard and what you think about the issues I have raised and as I am not with you today maybe Anne can have a go at them or you can have a general discussion and then we will see if there is anyone who wants to say anything in answer to our questions!!
Thank you so much
(Photo; Cardross Organic Garden. August 23)