Rufus May Blog Thinking Aloud

Critical feed-back can be like a biiter pill, difficult to swallow! A week ago my head was ringing with the different ways I had been described by journalists who had seen the film ‘The doctor who hears voices’. An acting friend recently told me “never read your reviews”.  Good advice, difficult to follow! O.K. We’ll start with the positive stuff: The Mirror had a headline describing me as a ‘mastermind’;  the Radio Times said I was ‘a fascinating figure’, Time Out said I was ‘a man of warmth and sincerity’ and Mark Lawson on Radio 4’s Front Row joked I was ‘Dr Who’, which my boys liked.  While a lot of reviewers said I was ‘maverick’ and ‘unorthodox’, the Mirror also said there was a ‘method in’ my ‘madness’. Meanwhile the ciritical voices began to appear, some of them verging on pathologising my mental health.  The Gurdian said I was ‘disturbing, if not disturbed’, and the Times ‘a  worrying character’.  I was also described as ‘peculiar’; the Telegraph said I was ’strange’ but liked my approach: ‘May took alarming risks but overall this is probably the way to go’. Given that the media has a terrible reutation for excluding the voices of personal experience and putting medical views of mental health on a pedestal I was pleased with the mixed but strong response to the film.  While I have had lots of positive feed-back, on the web there were also more critical views expressed. While Phil Thomas gave the film a great review in the BMJ, and a local medical school e-mailed me to ask for a copy of the film to use for training medical students, on the bulletin of doctors.net, one or two psychiatrists were describing me in terms that would be a bit too profane for this Blog! 

 

Clearly, ‘The doctor who hears voices’ has raised lots of issues.  For example, some commentators have suggested I am anti medication; that I think mental health workers are not compassionate people; that I am driven by bitterness and am using this to ’self-promote’ and ‘empire build’. So I thought it would be a good idea to respond to these issues.

 

I am not against drug treatment, I am for people having a choice about treatments as much as possible and having access to alternatives to drugs. I will go into more detail on my views on psychotropic medication in a future Blog. I do think the majority of mental health workers are very much in touch with their compassionate nature. However, I think that nationally, the system of care that is in place means many good caring people end up at times engaging in coercive practices they did not go into a caring profession to do.

 

I am guessing that by talking about my personal experiences of coercive treatment 21 years ago in the film ‘The Doctor who hears voices’, I have opened myself up to the accusation of being driven by bitterness to criticise traditional psychiatric approaches. So its good to be able to address this. I was bitter about the way I was treated in the psychiatric system 21 years ago. I would say the bitterness lasted 2 to 3 years. I then turned it into a more productive outrage as I started studying sociology and psychology and developed my vocation as a care worker. I think for most of my twenties I did have occasional nightmares about finding myself back in hospital against my will. These disappeared when I started to speak out about the psychological impact of this aspect of psychiatric treatment. I recently met someone in their twenties who still has nightmares of being forcibly medicated at the age of 16 in a West Yorkshire psychiatric hospital. I think the psychological impact of forced treatment is denied by those who practice it, so I welcome the opportunity to debate about its merits and necessity. I think we need more research on the psychological effects of compulsory or forced treatment, particularly with the government planning to extend compulsory treatment into people’s lives in community settings.

 

I think that I have turned my anger about my own ‘treatment’ and the ‘treatment’ I witnessed others receiving, into a passion for reforming mental health services. My own experiences and observations of psychiatric treatment and my professional experiences of working in mental health services for the last 13 years suggest that the violent practice of forced treatment is over-used. I believe that violent interventions such as making someone submit to a depot injection or ‘a rapid tranquillisation’ often has a deep alienating impact on the individual. My approach is not fuelled by bitterness rather it is fuelled by optimism that a genuine person centred approach that really listens to what people in crisis are going through (and gives them a range of ways of coping) is far more likely to contribute to the person’s psychological recovery. My work with self help groups and individuals who have experienced acute ward admissions suggests people are much more responsive to holistic approaches, being listened to compassionately, meaningful activities, hearing about other’s recovery journeys than they are to an over reliance on psychotropic medication. My work is fuelled by the fact I see a holistic approach having a much more positive impact than a drug-centred approach.

 

I do think that it is likely to be difficult to manage for example a twenty-one bedded male ward without using forced treatments. Therefore I think we need to rethink how we provide crisis care to people. A recent Mental Health Act Commission report described acute wards as “frightening and dangerous” that they were “tougher more scarier places” than ten years ago. Such findings also suggest we need to think again about how we provide care and support to people in crisis. This is another subject that deserves more discussion.

 

I would also like to respond to suggestions that I am engaging in an unhealthy ‘self promotion’ and that I am ‘empire building’. I challenge anyone who wants to, to debate this with me, preferably on national television! No but seriously media interviews I take part in and the recent film I contributed to (The Doctor who hears voices) can tend to focus on me as a ‘special individual’. On one chat forum I was described as allowing myself to be presented as a hero-monk! However if you go to my website www.rufusmay.com (or come to Evolving Minds public meetings I help organise) you will find my work is all about group-work and community development (as much as individual work) and I see myself as crucially linked in to many networks and emancipatory movements (in particular the hearing voices movement). So I see myself as part of a movement for change rather than an individual merely seeking power for its own sake. In Bradford and Hebden Bridge I can easily name many other colleagues operating from a similar perspective to myself. Many more are keen to hear and learn about different ways to approach emotional distress and confusion. So as well as a mental health worker, I also see myself as an activist who is part of an emancipatory movement. I have decided to engage with the media to generate wider awareness and debate about our society’s approach to distress and confusion. This does mean I am presented as a ’special individual’ in the media at times, which plays down the work of others. A good example is two years ago, when I agreed to do an interview with the Independent about the Brighton to London Bed-push (see www.bedpush.com) and the story was headlined ‘One man and a bed’ despite me telling the journalist about the fifteen other people involved. However I have come to the decision that this special treatment by the media is a price worth paying (and something I can clarify later) to get a dialogue going in wider society about how we spend resources on mental health services. Traditionally the media has not been interested in the rights of people to a peaceful approach to their mental health problems, so we have to be creative to engage their interest. Anybody is very welcome to continue this dialogue here with me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 2:48 am and is filed under Mental Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.