Week 3 - 2 questions and a Power Point

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On ordinary streets like this, there's a disaster waiting to happen. There's a group of people among us who pose a threat to their neighbors and indeed to the whole community. Too often, their potentially dangerous behavior is ignored until it's too late.

The public are angry about the alarming number of instants in which blonds injure or kill innocent people. Hardly a week goes by without news of a murder or attack by a blond, leading many to question why they're allowed to live freely in the community. Even if as some critics claim it's only a small minority causing the problem, it's not always possible to know which blonds are dangerous. We must put the rights of a community first and keep blonds in secure but humane institutions for their own good as well as ours.

Is it fair to judge a whole group of people because of the actions of just a few?

Next on the early evening news, the tragedy for the families who are victims of psychiatric--

After the murder of an 11-year-old girl by a newly discharged patient--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

--the murders committed by a psychiatric patient.

[SIRENS]

You look at the word "psycho," you always put killer after that. It's straight away that headline "psycho killer" or "mad axe murderer" and that's how mental health is represented in the media.

Where there are people who have killed or committed acts of violence, more often than not, there's actually a strong history of violence, so predominantly. these people are violent people, and they're violent people with and without the psychiatric diagnosis. The problem always seems to be the two are linked, and so if someone has a serious mental illness, then they're seen as seriously violent. And if someone is seriously violent, then presumably they're assumed to be seriously mentally ill because that's not normal behavior.

But it's far more likely that people who having mental health problems, if they are being violent, they're being violent towards themselves. That is, that they might take an overdose or they might cut themselves or harm themselves in some way, and that's really the far more likely scenario than they'll attack other people to they'll attack strangers out of the blue.

Well, I did a large-scale survey of representations of mental health on British television and found various things that were quite interesting, but including that there was an incredible over-representation of violence amongst people with mental health problems according to the television. On the new media, the news bulletins on BBC One and ITV, of all the people with a mental health problem that are presented, 70% of them are associated with violence.

I feel that if someone is suffering from a fairly serious mental disorder, I don't believe they should be in the community unless closely supervised because I think they're a potential danger, not only to themselves but to others.

Someone has been let out recently that murdered someone and things like that so these things occur in the community and isn't working.

The notion that the homicides by people with a psychiatric diagnosis has escalated in the last five to ten years since the increase in closure rates of the psychiatric hospitals, long-stay psychiatric hospitals, simply doesn't

stand up. While society in general has got more and more violent, there's absolutely no increase in violence committed by people who have a psychiatric diagnosis.

A lot of journalists probably don't know the full story on violence and community care and they would be surprised if they actually learned how few people are involved in that. The problem is that the other version of the story, the notion that people who come off community care immediately start killing, that version of the story has been put out first.

Well, my own mother says we don't want the big hospitals closed. The community isn't ready for them. And she has a daughter who has serious mental health problems because it's so strongly associated in the public mind with violence.

Do you have an image of somebody who's got psychiatric problems, what they would be like?

They will be like always muttering, talking to themselves and some people might be scared of them or they might be attacking people for no reason sometimes.

He's a person who's ill-equipped to cope with life and to look after himself in every way.

It rhymes. What else, Steve?

It has short lines.

Has short lines, that's right. So what were the rhyming words? Can any of you remember the little rhyming words? I'll just say that first verse again. Oh, second verse. Duck's tails, drake's tails, yellow feet a-quiver. Yellow bills all out of sight. Busy in the river. What's the rhyming words there? River and something else. Laurent?

Busy.

No. Clinton?

River and quiver.

Good. Good boy.

At the moment, I'm employed as a primary schoolteacher in a junior school because I've always worked in a sort of professional situation. People seem to have great difficulty in putting that together with the side of me that actually ends up in hospital as well. I was being all the time forced into this, you know, but you've got this marvelous job. You've got this-- you're not like the shuffling people you see walking down the road and stuff, and I think it's quite shocked people when they see me in hospital and seeing that actually I am like that as well. And it goes back to this thing of not being able to see you as somebody who can have mental health problems, but also be 10 to 20 other things as well. That's just one part of your personality, one part of your jigsaw that makes up you.

People who have mental health problems are managing to get on with life. They don't call into the local ward and say hey, guys, I'm getting on OK. They don't go around telling mental health professionals that they're OK. They don't go around telling the general public that they're OK, so you don't see them. You don't hear about them, because they're just getting on with things.

In the late 70s, I had several short admissions to a psychiatric unit. When I say short, I mean like three or four days. I was all over the place. I didn't know whether I was coming or going. A psychiatrist decided that I had hysterical personality disorder, whatever that is, and it was clear that he thought I was like this all the time. That was in the past, and I also was competent and had a job and things to contribute. And eventually, I was given an outpatient appointment with a consultant, and I was feeling fine. I walked in, said hello, and sat down. We had a little chat, and he looked at me and he said but you're completely normal. You know, but you think

that I'm-- all the time that I'm like in the hospital. So he then promptly changed my diagnosis to manic depression on the grounds that it must be cyclical.

To me, the overall issue about being stigmatized-- well, if you've got a mental health problem, that's it. You have no rights to have a job, to have an education, to have all the so-called benefits that our society provides for us. That's completely taken away from you.

Once I had any kind of diagnosis that brought me in touch with psychiatric services, people behaved differently towards me. It became more difficult certainly to pursue an academic career, certainly to pursue any kind of professional career, but also because I'd got the diagnosis, everything that I did was put down to the label. So if I behaved in a particular way, it was no longer because I was a reckless student. It was because I was a schizophrenic.

You can just see people's eyes cloud over if you ever acknowledge the fact that well, actually, yes, I have been to see a psychiatrist, never mind that you spent months behind locked doors.

Do not wreck this.

Right.

Got it.

Here?

Forward. Let's go that way. Up.

I was a civil servant for seven years, and I had quite a pressurized job within the Ministry of Defence. And when I was first ill and I first went sick, my boss went around telling everybody that I'd been locked up in a straight jacket and no one should talk to me. So within three weeks of me actually going sick, I was stripped of my security clearance. So basically, as soon and they found out I had depression and I was on medication, I was finished within the civil service. They didn't want to know, and I had no backup from them. That's it. So that was 1996. They decided to pension me out because they just didn't want me back, and it hurt. It really hurt.

I did have a very bad experience when I once spent nearly three months in psychiatric hospital. And last I was in the hospital, I was burgled three times by my downstairs neighbor, who said quite explicitly to other people in the street that he was doing it deliberately so that I would be so upset that I would stay in hospital and he could use my flat to take drugs. I think that's the worse kind of discrimination I've ever experienced. But what was in a way even worse was that the police wouldn't believe me. And they said-- not that they wouldn't believe me, but they said I wouldn't make a credible witness. I wasn't fit to bring a charge.

Prejudice and discrimination have effects not just on individuals, but also at a wider level. Establishing facilities for the people coming out of psychiatric units becomes difficult, if not impossible, when the public believes people with mental health problems are a danger to them.

After my first event, I moved into supportive accommodation in an upper borough, and the neighbors were very disrupted. They didn't like the fact that we were like a mental health community living right next door to them, and they would drive their cars up our drive, put their music on, then call the police. And as soon as they'd done it, they'd take their cars away. The police would come, knock on our door and say we've had people calling up saying that you've been playing your music loud, and we weren't. I would say we weren't. The problem is the neighbors. It's just that they didn't like the fact that they lived next to a mental health hospital. And that was partly, or obviously quite a large part responsible for me actually having to go back into hospital.

Because mental health nurses of course from the public originally and still read the papers and watch the TV, then there's going to do be a sense in which they can get drawn into that kind of view of people, and they might well end up wanting to think that mentally ill people are people to be controlled in some way. It's much harder

for professionals to stop and think, well, how do I talk with you or work with you about what the difficulties are that you're experiencing? It's usually, well, I'm the professional. I'll take over. I'll do it.

Professionals, especially in inpatient settings, have a lot of power, and they don't realize that they're dealing with real lives. These people will have to eventually go back out into the community and function in some way. And if they've been damaged by their inpatient stay, it's going to take a long time out in the community where there is I won't say less support, but less continuous support.

It's so easy for a professional, say, for instance, a psychiatrist, to go to medical school, qualify as a psychiatrist, read so many textbooks. But he's only got the theory side of everything, and he hasn't really experienced what it feels like to not being able to sleep or what the side effects of the medication they dish out a lot, which can be very, very terrifying for people to deal with that. They only get to see someone for five minutes, and they tend not to look up from the notes if they've got them in front of them.

The answer about changing prejudice is that professionals should go and talk to patients and meet patients. But I think the problem with that is that that's not easy. It isn't easy to talk to people who experience severe mental difficulties. But I believe that what has helped me enormously is listening to people and their experiences and thinking about that with them. I'm trying to resist the idea that I somehow as a professional got to have the answers or that there are automatically answers.

Well, I think it's very difficult to combat stigma amongst mental health professionals when you're actually under their care. And the work that I'm doing at the moment is to put people who use services in the mainstream and try to get the professionals who look after them to listen to their diversity and their talents, as well as their problems.

Welcome everyone. Thanks for coming to this mindmap event. So basically, what we're trying to do today is--

We're doing a lot of work around stigma and discrimination around mental health, getting young people to look at their views to talk about what their attitudes are towards it and then hit them with some information, some real facts rather than the mix that are portrayed every day and what they're bombarded with.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

A lot of the imagery that comes out, when you put it together on a sheet of paper, it just suddenly hits you. It's just like this complete picture of that stereotype.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

For me in terms of my experiences when I started breaking down, I didn't want to acknowledge what I was going through because I would be associated as a mental person or a nutter or a loony or a psycho or whatever. And I didn't want people to judge me on that basis, so it became very hard to even like acknowledge that to myself, let alone go and reach out for help.

And out of these words, we've made a little role play. So what we want you to do is watch us for about a minute. [UNINTELLIGIBLE PHRASE].

Have you got a problem? What do you want? [UNINTELLIGIBLE]

Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Before I came in, the media stereotyped my image of the people in mental health in thinking that they were-- there was something wrong with him, that they'd committed murder. But on one of the papers, it said that people in mental health are more likely to be attacked than to attack. That's very interesting.

We all have prejudices. I don't know a single person who doesn't have a prejudice. And the only way we're going to actually overcome that prejudice is by being able to look at it. And again, I see that as seeing about creating environments where people feel safe enough to look at those prejudices.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

In a new initiative under the name Headlines, mental health service users have enlisted the help of professional journalists and broadcasters to train them in using and responding to the media so their views will not be ignored.

What about the fact that the story itself might be set up in a way that might actually be quick critical of metal health users?

There needs to be something more robust about the way we deal with the media, who are allowed to peddle nothing less than lies without challenge. A a lot of my colleagues and myself spend a lot of time writing to newspapers in response to articles that are simply wrong, and the chances of someone with a psychiatric diagnosis getting their letters published is remarkably small.

I think it's very interesting to wonder why it is that you don't hear from users and survivors in stories and items on television and the newspapers about the mentally ill. It's a really glaring exception, actually. It's as if the news journalist did stories on race and had not a single black face or voice in their story, or they did stories about women and didn't have any women in their report. It is amazing. And I think when this is pointed out to journalists, the conscientious ones realize how glaring that is. I think it may come down to in the same way it would have done in the past on these points about race or gender, it may come down just to simple prejudice and a sense that somehow a user wouldn't be able to coherently put their own case.

Let's cut to the chase. What do you think journalists, given all those different types of journalists, what are they looking for when they come to you for an interview? What do they want? What are the different things they might want?

A story.

Mentally ill people no longer see themselves as problems or sufferers or victims. They themselves know that, and they've known that for a long time. To the media, that's a real story, because it the exception to the rule. At the moment, there is a sense that there is perhaps a fixed view of the mentally ill or people's uses of mental health services, and it is up to, in a way, those people to turn that around and to explain to journalists why something new is going on.

To have the sort of pressure put on you that you've got to change society, it's like racism. You know you've got to change white people in order for them to accept you, and they're sort of-- you know, it doesn't quite balance out right in a way. But if that's what we've got to do, we've got to do it. But it takes a lot of guts.

Society can't afford to go around just dismissing that section of society and sort of confining them to the dustbin because it's quite a large number of people with an awful lot of skills and talents there. And really, can society afford to lose all of that? I don't think it can.

[MUSIC]