I’ve just had a really beneficial, possibly life altering conversation, with a volunteer who works for Hull Mind’s ‘Crisis Pad’ service- which I probably wouldn’t have had a need or chance to do if certain preliminary and pre-existing NHS services, tasked with the rather voluminous task of saving people’s lives within crisis mental health services…
The Crisis Pad is a place of sanctuary, a blessing to the region of Hull, where, the actual needs and demands of lives needing to be saved, and which cannot be managed by the NHS alone, without outsourcing contracts to different charities and commissioned sources which are far from consistent in their ‘public sector’ approach or founding principles, so as to serve a more ‘fit for purpose’ role in tackling a major issues like mental health in their communities, entire health sector and politically, economically sensitive remits, whereby the ‘post code lottery’ and NHS efficiency debate are fit in which to thrive as a topic for discussion, with this crucial need to help the people who the system itself, via corrupt and disjointed delivery of services and treatment, sustains a continuous narrative of ‘crisis’ and ‘containment’ in the first place…
For context-
Hope is real though, and the team at Mind HEY’s Crisis Pad truly helped me to see this again.
I’d recommend anyone to find out more, and advocate for its further recognition, celebration and funding…
For a start,
I recommend anyone to check out at least the website for Hull and East Yorkshire Mind itself- in there you can get a better idea, and find out about more means they can support you where others can’t, how to get involved, peoples remarkable lived experience stories, news, information etc…
Causing myself and my inner passions to digress- not at all unusual- but once again, here I find myself having to remind myself about what it is I’m actually talking about at all!
Identity- ‘who am I?’…
Moreover, how could it be the case a single one to one, which lasted only an hour- which was all it took, praise be to the genuine skills, passion, training and insight that staff working for mental health within a charity sector like the mental health charity, Mind- could enable me to shift my entire way and outlook of ‘doomsday thinking’, into such an empowering realisation, and reminder of something I had long since forgotten within myself, and my reason to be here, keep going, and fight for myself, because I CAN…
It never ceases to amaze me still, while also, simultaneously, reignite my spark, to spend just an hour with one professional, during a self referred time slot to a ‘crisis pad’, sought out in desperate hours/weeks/seconds/months (etc.), of critically dangerous, and intolerable mental health turmoil, to find myself stunned once again, by the rediscovery of an existence promising hope, and the prospect of a future , Mind’s staff- paid and voluntary- do offer, and remind me, exists- and always did, too.
After attending this service, you genuinely can find yourself leaving, following this relatively short period of revival, yet affected profoundly by staff so astonishingly capable of saving a life, your life, which you truly feared was extinguished, after so many years, of such arduous battling.
Mind’s crisis Pad, I have to say that no doubt- compared with other 60 minute sessions with other so called ‘mental health support professionals’, (across these differing and broken fragmented NHS mental health services), you can spend a thirty minute one to one conversation with they staff there, and remarkably, the individuals supporting you in this service, can enable you to find and reclaim your inner roar. Sometimes just within a night.
Bellowing fiercely, l adamantly, stubbornly, stand back again, and, thanks to the compassion and wisdom of Mind’s crisis pad staff, I remember deep down, I am here for a reason. That this struggle is temporary. There are options, I am not alone, and while everyone is different, we are all capable of recovery. The power lies, ultimately, within our own souls.
Years and years of living with mental illness, and the need for support, has worryingly manifested itself as the hurricane into my own unsalvageable demise, with an invigorating ‘talking therapy’, which reminded me of why and how I needed to save my own life- a stark contrast to the feeling and message I get whenever I have dealt with the absolute clusterfuck of the actual NHS ‘crisis teams’/‘home based treatment teams’/‘inpatient admissions to psychiatric hospitals/‘community based mental health teams’/ other ‘specialist services’ targeted for those like myself, officially ‘diagnosed as having ‘complex needs’ sufficient enough to warrant the likes of EMDR treatment, specialist inpatient admissions, community based treatments.
Where one side of these NHS funded and outsourced/commissioned/entangled multidisciplinary teams could leave me feeling more suicidal than I’d ever been pre-engagement, to the point of being discharged- unsafe, clinically vulnerable yet dismissed as having ‘no clinical need for input which would safeguard myself and others’, I was, and continue to find, that there DOES still exist a realm and a service within the imperative and most essential realm of adequate and enabling mental health support services, that DOES enable, salvage, advise, liberate, support and serve its purpose, and beyond.
Hull and East Yorkshire Mind- I cannot sing your praises enough.
Every human being on the planet needs a sense of ‘identity’.
Mind has helped me remember and to rediscover my own.
Other Mental health services across the UK suffer the ‘slings and arrows’ of categorisation’, ‘direction’, ‘socially perpetuated and corruptly human sourced misdirection’, which makes the traumatised and the totally enslaved ‘free agents’ within a system which does not want its own citizens to realise what the fuck is going on, and how unnecessary it is to keep on falling prey to this cycle of despair and hopelessness, which sustains itself, usually, because the ones- like ourselves, and likewise, unknowingly part of the problem, because, we LIVE inside the problem, and our good intentions become distorted by sheer frustration and desperation, when reality bites the optimistic, passionate agents capable of recognising the ‘problem’ and initiating a change which the status quo, and big pharma type, politically fucked, broken beyond insight to realise, so harshly and oppressively on the arse, that in order to even ‘function’ within the workplace of a role they truly had good intentions and benevolent motivations towards trying to work within, we lose our original sense of ‘who we are’, what it is we are motivated and influenced by, in order to try and deliver and avoid the dance with devils which we never truly knew, were so captivating and cunning in their choreography, that they showed you the abyss you were starting right into, and made the abyss per say, stare and manifest itself right back through you…
The ‘trap’.
People begin to embrace the corruption they work within, and become sapped by the energy of this need to become the problem in order to stand a chance in Hell of ever understanding how to change or help it, as originally hoped, that the original goal of ‘helping people’ and challenging the corruption, becomes so blurred that to keep working within it, And/or being pushed outside of having ‘the capacity to work within’, totally shreds such a fundamental component to autonomy, change, positive advocacy and power, which starts within the crucial foundation of the very ‘identity’ each person trapped within the machine had the imperative pre-requisite to help initiate ‘change’, due to the power it enables an agent, up against all odds of defiance against what is not working, must be able to sustain and cling onto, in order to keep them going, without becoming broken, and on the ‘other end’ of this battle to ‘improve services’ designed to help people, like freely and equally accessible services to enhance and treat the colossal issue of mental health, within the ‘National Health Service’, which has had to suffer from secrecy and hidden privatisation, so sly, so broken, so dark and so complex, that even Socrates and his students in Ancient Greek Philosophy would be tired out by even trying to debate and comprehend, as an intellectual and philosophical remit of inquiry alone.
And trust me, once you flabbergast and stupidly, enslave and misdirect the Philosophers themselves, you have yourself a situation which is of quite some gravity, to say the least.
Mind does not shackle
Or enslave you…
I can actually liberate and re-light you…
Mind’s Crisis Pad service has been the only mental health service I can confidently affirm has managed to help me smile again…
Not all regions across the UK have this crisis pad facility, but, limited to an extent though its capacity, staffing, places and opening hours may be, I passionately advocate the case for such a service to be considered and adopted by the mental health charity, Mind, across the wider range of different localities.
I’m not saying that constant reliance on the need to put in mental health crisis referrals on such a regular basis is how and all it should be for those of us in need- ideally, the NHS services themselves should be equipped and supported to deliver the longer term, therapeutic and consistent treatments which so many people so desperately need.
But that is in itself an entirely different post, one which demands the energy of a person like myself- who needs to preserve all the fight left in me, towards more positive endeavours, and the true direction of recovery.
Hull and East Yorkshire Mind- I thank you for the compassion, understanding, time, patience and dedicated of staff, and the provision of course of the crisis lad service itself, for saving my life on more occasions than I can count.
Mind-in-motion 