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Helping others has given me a purpose
• I FEEL a real loss after the executive’s decision to terminate Camden Mental Health Consortium.
When I used to sit in a day centre, at Mind in Camden, smoking and drinking coffee, I sat there with other service users feeling I had nothing to offer them of therapeutic value.
Camden Borough User Group the working arm of CMHC has given me skills so that I can now help other service users. This involvement role has given me a purpose in life, helping others in their recovery process. I have also been inspired with the support of CMHC and now passed my law degree.
I found it rewarding, visiting and talking to mental health patients on psychiatric wards at the hospital, while performing my duties on their patients’ council.
Patients often questioned my identity and I was pleased to reply to them that I was a service user, and had no connection with the professional bodies around them.
Whatever we discussed was in confidence.
I was on a mission to make their journey to recovery comfortable in any way that I could help.
Once they knew that I was not a threat to them they then felt comfortable to reveal their thoughts, fears, expectations and concerns to me, in a manner which even revealed issues which they never told the authorities and that they had feared would have been documented by the professionals.
After nearly nine years of involvement it will be difficult for me to accept the loss of this organisation, an essential part of the mental health system.
Its core feature is that CBUG members have had some kind of experience of mental health. CMHC has given invaluable and intensive training in mental health practices and issues, most recently, mental health first aid.
The system already has professionals in place and CMHC is the missing link which offers friendship to sufferers of mental illness. CMHC will be a sad loss.
NOEL WALKER
Juniper Crescent, NW1
Silenced
• THE mentally ill are seldom listened to because people too often consider that what they say is simply the rantings of the mad.
Camden Mental Health Consortium tried to provide a voice for us. The council did not like what they said on our behalf and therefore decided that they would stop them by removing their funding.
This is just another example of how society regards us – without rights. If we speak then we are ignored. If someone speaks for us then they are silenced.
TOM ARNOLD
Haverstock Hill, NW3
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