Post by flyingcarpet46 on Apr 29, 2022 12:43:34 GMT
Following the recent death of Peter Campbell, a stalwart of SSO and a consistent mental health activist over 40 years , I have been approached for any material I might have as a fellow Survivor. I have gathered some quotations which I feel highlight the nature of the Survivor and 'user movement' (from early 1980s to late 1990s).
I first met Peter at the Ist SSO National Conference at a Edale Youth Hostel in the Peak District 1987, I can still see him during the informal entertainment performing the 'Largatil Shuffle' but there were serious matters to attend to as well - the drawing up and voting on a Charter of Needs and Demands and a statement on the government's proposal for a Community Treatment Order
Peter has written
Unsourced.
I have consumed or have been consumed by mental health services for 25 years. (Fc. Probably 1990s)
Openmind.undated.
In the early 1980s, when service users started organising, the inadequacies of the acute ward were common, a shared experience that pushed many of us into activism. It is not insignificant that the findings of the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health's 1988 report " Acute Problems" are anticipated by ten years by Canden Consortium's "Treated Well? ...., one of the first publications by a local user/survivor group.
+
Even now, service providers only hear what they are equipped to hear - one of the reasons radical suggestions like 24 hour crisis houses take 20 years to become a reality
Guardian 03/09/2008. Mad pride and prejudice.
Interview with Peter Campbell Andrew Roberts and Frank Bangay.
Peter said:
Even in the early 90s, nobody in the statutory services gave a damn about advance directives or advocacy - the assumption is that these things have happened through the guidance of right-minded professionals. But they had to be fought for.
(A. SSO produced a Crisis Card and statement on Advance Directives but these were not picked up by the statutory services).
Social Work Today. 9/11/1989. (Fc 30 years ago)
We are operating in a time where new concepts are being thrown about with undue abandon. How do concepts like "democratic psychiatry", "user involvement" and "quality services" fit in with each other? Where do "throughput" and "beds per night year" come into the reckoning? Is there necessarily any connection between "consumerism" and "user empowerment" not to mention "human rights "
Seclusion was a major issue for Peter.
Openmind 61. 1993.
On more than one occasion when I have been struggling to hold onto my humanity , uncertain whether I was good or evil, ,Christ like or Satan, i have found myself locked up and abandoned in a cell, deprived of human contact, observed but not comforted
Openmind 52 . 199?
One symbol of the failure of psychiatric imagination is the practice that surrounds the policy of seclusion . There seems to be a fashion now for painting the walls of seclusion rooms pink .
Openmind. Undated.
An independent observer/advocate should be called in everytime someone is secluded. Recipients should have a legal right to counselling afterwards. The practice of confining people in police cells while awaiting assessment should be outlawed
Another issue was Compulsory Treatment Orders.
Joint letter from SSO to Virginia Bottomley, with reps from UKAN and Mindlink on the proposed Community Treatment/Supervision Orders 7/91/1999. (A VB did a u-turn).
We do not think that amending the 1983 Mental Health Act to include a Compulsory Treatment Order or Community Supervision Order will improve the quality of care... we believe a critical element in good mental health care is the relationship between those who give care and those who receive it . People often opt out of the system because of the way in which care and treatment is presented to them.
BUT
Journal of Mental Health , 1992. ,(1).
Our demands are not due to an ideological obsession with the use of neuroleptic drugs. They are rooted in the perception that current acute services often damage and devalue us psychologically and rarely, if ever attempt to address the meaning and significance of our distress in human terms... (it) can only be seen as a major failure of creative imagination.
I cannot believe it is possible to dismiss as meaningless people"s most vivid and challenging interior experiences and expect no harm to ensue. Recipients spend much time searching for meaning ang grappling with the consequences of experiencing the types of distress that the majority classify as signs of "mental illness" or "madness
(A. There was a deliberate move to talk of 'emotional and mental distress' to replace 'mental illness' while recognising this term also has some limitations)
Unsourced.
It is extremely damaging to tell people that their soul or spirit is diseased or that it has no value, that their deepest experiences are meaningless. It denies us our human status
OPENMIND 155 2009.
It is easy to demonise medication. Medication has played an important part in helping me return home swiftly after a crisis. On the other hand, i have no doubt the narrowness of the acute ward response, the unwillingness to address important aspects of my distress, is linked to the assumption that my crisis is primarily a medical event with medical solutions...important elements of my experience have been continually dismissed.
Journal of Mental Health 1992 (1)
... the prevailing mood within much of psychiatry and society still seems to cite anyone anyone withdraws from treatments as "lacking insight" and sees quality of life as depending on more medication, more assertively delivered. In such climates arguing about appropriateness (of the use psychiatric medications) seems a bit like gargling with porridge
+
From this quarter (the " user movement") many of the good insights are now coming, not only in terms of alternative services, but in the exploration of sensitive response to crisis and, in particular , the positive revaluing of hitherto disregarded personal experience
On the making of a documentary We're not Mad...We're Angry screened on prime time television C4 in 1987. Peter was interviewd by his local newspaper Ham and High (a sketch of a woman's admission to hospital within the documentary was scripted by Peter)
The experience if working creatively together and talking about their experience has therapeutic value...within the psychiatric system we were powerless. Our rights were taken away and our opinion no longer valued. What we did was make something creative out of something negative.
+
In the end, after two years hard work by 20 'mentally ill' people, we made a coherent documentary - and not many people can say that
+
What's happening now is more than simply a question of shouting 'we hate you' .It's a broad attempt to radically change not only the psychiatric system, but society itself.
BMJ vol 306 27/03/1993.
We may be becoming more visible. Will we be less marginal?
Openmind March 2001.
Although it is unfashionable to talk about psychiatric oppression, society keeps a steady grip on who I am.
I first met Peter at the Ist SSO National Conference at a Edale Youth Hostel in the Peak District 1987, I can still see him during the informal entertainment performing the 'Largatil Shuffle' but there were serious matters to attend to as well - the drawing up and voting on a Charter of Needs and Demands and a statement on the government's proposal for a Community Treatment Order
Peter has written
Unsourced.
I have consumed or have been consumed by mental health services for 25 years. (Fc. Probably 1990s)
Openmind.undated.
In the early 1980s, when service users started organising, the inadequacies of the acute ward were common, a shared experience that pushed many of us into activism. It is not insignificant that the findings of the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health's 1988 report " Acute Problems" are anticipated by ten years by Canden Consortium's "Treated Well? ...., one of the first publications by a local user/survivor group.
+
Even now, service providers only hear what they are equipped to hear - one of the reasons radical suggestions like 24 hour crisis houses take 20 years to become a reality
Guardian 03/09/2008. Mad pride and prejudice.
Interview with Peter Campbell Andrew Roberts and Frank Bangay.
Peter said:
Even in the early 90s, nobody in the statutory services gave a damn about advance directives or advocacy - the assumption is that these things have happened through the guidance of right-minded professionals. But they had to be fought for.
(A. SSO produced a Crisis Card and statement on Advance Directives but these were not picked up by the statutory services).
Social Work Today. 9/11/1989. (Fc 30 years ago)
We are operating in a time where new concepts are being thrown about with undue abandon. How do concepts like "democratic psychiatry", "user involvement" and "quality services" fit in with each other? Where do "throughput" and "beds per night year" come into the reckoning? Is there necessarily any connection between "consumerism" and "user empowerment" not to mention "human rights "
Seclusion was a major issue for Peter.
Openmind 61. 1993.
On more than one occasion when I have been struggling to hold onto my humanity , uncertain whether I was good or evil, ,Christ like or Satan, i have found myself locked up and abandoned in a cell, deprived of human contact, observed but not comforted
Openmind 52 . 199?
One symbol of the failure of psychiatric imagination is the practice that surrounds the policy of seclusion . There seems to be a fashion now for painting the walls of seclusion rooms pink .
Openmind. Undated.
An independent observer/advocate should be called in everytime someone is secluded. Recipients should have a legal right to counselling afterwards. The practice of confining people in police cells while awaiting assessment should be outlawed
Another issue was Compulsory Treatment Orders.
Joint letter from SSO to Virginia Bottomley, with reps from UKAN and Mindlink on the proposed Community Treatment/Supervision Orders 7/91/1999. (A VB did a u-turn).
We do not think that amending the 1983 Mental Health Act to include a Compulsory Treatment Order or Community Supervision Order will improve the quality of care... we believe a critical element in good mental health care is the relationship between those who give care and those who receive it . People often opt out of the system because of the way in which care and treatment is presented to them.
BUT
Journal of Mental Health , 1992. ,(1).
Our demands are not due to an ideological obsession with the use of neuroleptic drugs. They are rooted in the perception that current acute services often damage and devalue us psychologically and rarely, if ever attempt to address the meaning and significance of our distress in human terms... (it) can only be seen as a major failure of creative imagination.
I cannot believe it is possible to dismiss as meaningless people"s most vivid and challenging interior experiences and expect no harm to ensue. Recipients spend much time searching for meaning ang grappling with the consequences of experiencing the types of distress that the majority classify as signs of "mental illness" or "madness
(A. There was a deliberate move to talk of 'emotional and mental distress' to replace 'mental illness' while recognising this term also has some limitations)
Unsourced.
It is extremely damaging to tell people that their soul or spirit is diseased or that it has no value, that their deepest experiences are meaningless. It denies us our human status
OPENMIND 155 2009.
It is easy to demonise medication. Medication has played an important part in helping me return home swiftly after a crisis. On the other hand, i have no doubt the narrowness of the acute ward response, the unwillingness to address important aspects of my distress, is linked to the assumption that my crisis is primarily a medical event with medical solutions...important elements of my experience have been continually dismissed.
Journal of Mental Health 1992 (1)
... the prevailing mood within much of psychiatry and society still seems to cite anyone anyone withdraws from treatments as "lacking insight" and sees quality of life as depending on more medication, more assertively delivered. In such climates arguing about appropriateness (of the use psychiatric medications) seems a bit like gargling with porridge
+
From this quarter (the " user movement") many of the good insights are now coming, not only in terms of alternative services, but in the exploration of sensitive response to crisis and, in particular , the positive revaluing of hitherto disregarded personal experience
On the making of a documentary We're not Mad...We're Angry screened on prime time television C4 in 1987. Peter was interviewd by his local newspaper Ham and High (a sketch of a woman's admission to hospital within the documentary was scripted by Peter)
The experience if working creatively together and talking about their experience has therapeutic value...within the psychiatric system we were powerless. Our rights were taken away and our opinion no longer valued. What we did was make something creative out of something negative.
+
In the end, after two years hard work by 20 'mentally ill' people, we made a coherent documentary - and not many people can say that
+
What's happening now is more than simply a question of shouting 'we hate you' .It's a broad attempt to radically change not only the psychiatric system, but society itself.
BMJ vol 306 27/03/1993.
We may be becoming more visible. Will we be less marginal?
Openmind March 2001.
Although it is unfashionable to talk about psychiatric oppression, society keeps a steady grip on who I am.