REVOLUTION

REVOLUTION

Centred SMAHF

14 October 2023

Falcon square Inverness

Graham Morgan – Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland

Hello everyone

It is lovely to be here, my name is Graham Morgan and I had better introduce myself.

I am here to talk about revolution and mental health; I have lived with a mental illness for the last forty years. I was originally diagnosed with a personality disorder when I was admitted to one of the old Asylums when I was twenty after a suicide attempt, and was then given a new diagnosis of schizophrenia not long after my son was born when I was twenty eight.

It would be really silly to say I have had a lovely life; being sectioned on numerous occasions and compulsorily treated for the last fourteen years does not add up to the perfect life. I have spent considerable parts of my life wanting to be dead or at least believing I should be dead and have also witnessed the damage I have caused to those I love when I have been psychotic.

However, having said that I have also often had a wonderful life. There is nothing better than kissing my partner Wendy good morning, or getting a hug from her daughter when she goes to school or getting a bark in thanks from her son when I take up his tea to his room. I love walking everyday with our dog Dash, it is good to pass the seals on their rocks and to look at the curlews and oyster catchers or to stoop to pick a blackberry from the brambles. I am lucky to have friends; to have enough money not to worry too much about the heating and food bills. I have a job with the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland which is all about the rights of people with conditions such as mine and love wandering the country meeting people to learn of their lives and what might improve them. I like to cook, to write my books, to sleep as much as I can, to listen to my family being as silly as they can.

I do not have a spectacularly exciting life and do not much care about that, I have had far more excitement than is good for me in the past but I have a life I like very much. I get support from my mental health team and sometimes like it and sometimes hate it but it keeps me alive. I go to Jeans Bothy in Argyll, where I live; a wellbeing hub where I do the photography and writing, sometimes sit and natter, sometimes sit in silence. It is a safe, warm place for me to go to.

It is a life I did not dream I would ever have. It is not so long ago that I felt terribly lonely and dreaded the years in front of me. At one stage I had little money and slept on a mattress on the floor of my room because I could not get the energy to do anything better. Many years ago I could not work, I cannot explain that properly. There are times when your world is just different. You sleep in the day, stay up all night, your emotions are a clatter against you and you cannot concentrate on very much at all. The idea of getting to somewhere on time and spending the day doing something productive and organised is alien. The thought of doing what you are told or interacting with colleagues; just ludicrous.

I have many friends in this position; they do not use the heating because that became too expensive years ago. They haven’t worked for years and rarely if ever have friends visit. They live days which are pretty grey and pretty dismal and wish for something better but better never comes along. They seek help for the pain they are in but struggle to get it. They take pills that maybe help but also come with side effects they don’t want. They get called for benefit reviews and in an effort to be respectable get them disallowed because people do not understand that you can dress well and smile and still be disabled due to your mental illness.

I did not know I would be saying this but if we want a revolution then we need to have a world where those of us who just cannot do, don’t struggle. A world where people do not hide the fact that they get benefits because they are seen by the media as scroungers. A world where friendship is possible; a world where there are places to go to, to just be with no goals or targets just the knowledge that there is somewhere safe and warm and accepting to be in. These are small basics that make a revolution. So many people with a mental illness, live alone and in poverty, they have lost the energy to go out like I do, to celebrate the trees and the clouds in the sky and the thought of work is only a source of shame and despair. This does not need to be the case. If I can get support for my mental health, if I can get disability benefits, and bus passes and railcards then so should other people with mental health problems. I have a family and friends who are used to my foibles and weird ideas and despite some of the agony my life still involves, they still love and treasure me and when I need space and sanctuary I have a centre I can go to where I do not have to pretend or be anything other than who I really am and that is such a relief.

It should be possible in the right society with the right will and the right attitudes for everyone with a mental illness to have something approaching this – that is one of the revolutions I would like to see. A fairly obvious one and a possible one. Not a revolution of becoming productive and well and organised and flourishing but a revolution where we recognise that however capable we are it doesn’t matter. We should have a right to a house we feel safe in, places to go and do things if we want; maybe with other people. Friends maybe who we can share a meal with. Enough money to occasionally go to the pub or for a meal and no targets goals or need to prove you deserve it; just the simple knowledge that whoever we are, we are treasured.

The other revolution for those of us with mental health problems is even more simple and basic and maybe, despite the fact I think it is achievable, even more naïve. Let me tell you about it.

Mental illness, distress, trauma, anguish; however we might choose to look at it is harsh and horrible. Many of us end up alone and isolated and do not quite understand why we have no one to talk to or why the people who set out to help us keep a cool clinical distance from us. I think sometimes when we have pasts or even presents where we have been rejected and wounded and betrayed; where we know full well what it is to be despised by those we had hoped loved us. We can fall apart and when we fall apart we do not do this in a neat lovable way. We do not sit there waiting to be loved again and then magically regain our smiles and our confidence and our warmth as soon as someone offers us a glimpse of kindness. Often we are angry and we are suspicious and we do not trust and we may not even want help or seek help or feel there is anything wrong at all.

That is a recipe for lots and lots of things to go wrong. It is even more of a recipe for hurt and anger when we are made to take treatment and do things we do not want to do.

I have had so many people who are nurses or social workers or psychiatrists in my life and some of them have been absolutely wonderful. Their commitment, passion and warmth and skill has transformed my life. But I have also met people who I doubt wish to be around me, who, for some reason, lack the skills to create connection and belonging and to help me find a reason to want to get up in the morning. Some of those people might have problems of their own; others may have been taught that to be professional you need cast iron boundaries between you and the people you are helping. Some of them may be exhausted and cynical and have lost interest or belief in their job or some of them may have very different value systems to me. Whatever it is that causes it, some of those people have damaged me or are just so cold and uninterested that I would never in a month of Sundays dream of confiding those personal aspects of my life that sometimes need expressed when I am being cared for.

Earlier I mentioned some of the basic needs we have, such as food and warmth and work and activity and said a revolution could occur if everyone had such things but for me the bigger revolution occurs when we look at other needs we have.

And these needs are for love and kindness and compassion. They are to have people who respect us and believe in us and want us to have happier, more content lives and will work with us to try to make this happen. So many people with a mental illness do not have this in their lives and certainly don’t get it from those paid to work with us and try to help heal our hurt. My revolution would mean that when my community nurse or psychiatrist or social worker go through an appraisal, key to it will be to find out how they offered kindness to me; not a fake smiley kindness, but a genuine wish to treat me kindly. It will be to see if, when they section me or give me my jag, that they do it with love in the hope that what they do, may make my life a better one. It will be to ask us, their clients, if we felt that they the workers in our lives gave us a feeling of emotional warmth or a feeling that they appreciated us as fellow equals who happen to be struggling.

It is a basic and simple right that somehow we neglect and should be what we look for and treasure in the people we employ; the simple humanity we expect one person to offer another person as a part of being fellow beings in this world. The simplicity of making dignity central to what we provide.

That sounds easy; it is easy to do with those that are family or friends or lovers or usually it is, but it is harder to do when people like me come to the table feeling suspicious or angry or lost or despairing or hopeless but for me connection and being given the feeling I belong in this world is more important by far than anything else.

I may need medication and may benefit from various therapies but if I feel alienated and looked down on by those who offer me help then I will not want to take my medication and I will not participate and I will not engage and I will not turn up for appointments and that will not be my fault. Even if my lack of trust is because of my illness or my past, I still need and deserve the basic respect we expect to give each other as far as we possibly can.

My last small minute of revolution. In the first lockdown, where I lived, the skies were blue and sunny and though we were frightened and could not hug or be in each others company. In my village and countless other villages, we paused as we walked up a street and struck up conversations with our neighbours which we hadn’t done before and enquired about people who might be struggling to get food or look after themselves. Sometime later, that wonderful sense of community died away with the soundbites of blame in the media but my revolution is a hankering after community connection where we understand that those of us who are silent in the pub, or who speak back awkwardly or even get angry sometimes or those who we never see, that we see beyond this. There are reasons why we are like this; there are reasons why I think I am destroying the world. There are reasons I don’t talk in company. Reasons why I can get scruffy and unkempt and reasons why sometimes I harm those I love more than anything by wanting to die.

Despite that I have as much right to walk along the road in the village and get as much pleasure when someone smiles at me or gives me a gift as those that can navigate such complexity without even thinking about it. So yes, my last revolution very hippy, but let’s love as much as we can; let’s make the world for everyone whoever we may be, be as accepting and respecting as it can possibly be. For those of us who we avoid and look at with suspicion and hatred for whatever reason; let us remember that dignity is at the core of all the human rights that apply to all of us.

Thank you.

(Photos. Ness Islands october 2023, Me, Walk a Mile Falcon Sq Inverness Oct 2023 , Ardmore Oct 2023, family Oct 2023, Patisserie Chantilly Oct 2023, Ardmore Oct 2023)