Black women on recovery
As part of SPN’s work on our recovery Paper, joint project co-ordinators Raza Griffiths and Vicky Nicholls held a focus group to listen to the views and life experiences of black women on recovery.
Five women participated in the lively and informal group, which was held at the Afiya Trust in south London on 2 May 2007. Jean Healy, SPN administrator extraordinaire had the unenviable task of typing up the recordings of the conversations and has been nursing a swollen wrist from all that finger work since!
The SPN recovery Paper follows on from SPN’s writing of a draft Paper on recovery commissioned by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, CSIP and SCIE. For that Paper, however, SPN did not have final editorial control. This led to SPN deciding to produce its own Paper that would develop some of the emergent themes and also represent the views of minorities – particularly BME women – more fully.
“The shifting paradigm of recovery is one of the key debates in mental health at the moment”, believes Raza. “It is particularly important that service users are at the heart of defining what constitutes recovery as services are reconfigured around this concept”.
And defining what exactly recovery is proved to be one of the major talking points in the discussion, with several women saying the concept of recovery was not one they would use of their own journey, as recovery relied on the idea of having an illness one needed to recover from, or as a linear process towards a single goal. The possibility of relapse had to be taken into account. There was also no sense of coming back to where you were before an illness. “You can never be the same person again, you can never go back to the time before your breakdown” a participant said.
Vicky Nicholls, who had been one of the main liaison people at SPN during the write up of the draft for the earlier RCP/SCIE/|CSIP recovery Paper, said “We were particularly keen to explore what kept people well or helped people to recover”.
Spirituality and membership of faith community had helped some people. In fact, one woman felt that her mental health condition was a sign of being spiritually “touched”, rather than as something negative. Another talked of the value of concepts such as karma in helping to understand mental distress. However, another participant felt she had been faced by misunderstanding and mistrust when she told disclosed to her church that she was experiencing distress. “They just kept saying that if I believed enough, it would just go away”.
Other important factors helping the recovery process were being a member of a wider community, particularly of other BME women and people who had themselves experienced mental distress. On a practical level, healthy diet was mentioned (even if it was not always in evidence in hospital wards!), friends, and helpful advocates, particularly in guiding patients round hospital procedures.
Issues that needed tackling to facilitate recovery were the continued severe stigma and discrimination experienced in so many different areas, from family to employment, and the sometimes severe negative side effects of drugs, such as weight gain. “We urgently need more information and more choice around drugs” emphasised one participant. Another mentioned the need to change un-therapeutic conditions on mixed sex wards, where some women felt under threat of violence or sexual assault from men.
Many of the points raised related very strongly to SPN’s ethos of seeing mental health holistically. When a mother became ill, for example, children were affected because they might have to look after younger siblings and might also experience social stigma from friends on finding out their parent was ill. Illness of a mother also raised practical questions of who would pick children up from school . This was a good cue for Vicky to inform participants about SPN’s administering the Parental and Child Welfare Mental Health Network, which aims to bring holistic thinking around these issues.
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