Small victories: the bumpy road of mental health recovery
Before starting my frontline placement, I’ll admit that I was optimistic about the change that I could help to bring about at the organisation I’d be working with. Fresh from kick-off bootcamp, and spending a week with my inspiring cohort and the Year Here staff, I had visions of the large-scale projects that I might be able to pull off, and the wide-reaching impact it could have. Two months in and a valuable life lesson has been learnt; that small victories add up, and they deserve celebration just as much as the bigger ones.
An Introduction to St Mungo’s
For my placement I am based at St Mungo’s South Camden Mental Health Accommodation Services, which provides supported housing to homeless clients with mental health support needs, including people with drug and/or alcohol issues. St Mungo’s uses an ‘asset-based’ approach to recovery which encourages clients to get in touch with their strengths, interests and aspirations, to promote positive mental health and help them gain the life skills needed to move on to independent living. It moves away from previous models of social care and adult mental health that traditionally focused on the deficits and problems of an individual.
I’ve been tasked with supporting this approach by increasing the range of productive activities available within the services for clients to engage with. The challenge I find here is not necessarily a lack of activities available though; indeed the staff and fantastic volunteers across the service work hard to organise a range of trips out, art, music and exercise classes. The real barrier is getting people to show up to these activities in the first place when the day-to-day reality of life with a mental health problem can make this so difficult.
Some of the disorders clients at St Mungo’s are facing include bipolar, schizophrenia and depression. Daily medications taken to deal with these can cause unwelcome side effects and drowsiness which can make the simplest of tasks hard. In some cases this is compounded by alcohol and substance misuse, which are used both as coping mechanisms and a means of escape from the stigma they face from ‘mainstream’ society as a result of their homelessness. For me, this has translated to poorly attended events, long days of knocking on doors with no response, or chaotic group classes that often end abruptly. ‘Difficult to engage’ has quickly become a daily phrase.
Re-thinking what meaningful engagement is
As a ‘social innovator’ in this space, at this point it is very easy to become discouraged. Admittedly, I have already had many moments of quiet despair and questioning: ‘How can I possibly help?’…. ‘Is my idea rubbish?’…. ‘Am I making a difference?’ But I’ve realised that to focus too much on what I think isn’t going right, undermines the achievements that are happening every day. For all the frustrations, there have also been flashes of hope; clients who are slowly making small changes in their lives for the better, whether this is showing up for breakfast once a week and holding a conversation, or tidying their rooms. Such small things, but such important victories.
What this shows is that mental health recovery is a process and it can mean different things to different people. For some, recovery may be about recapturing one’s former level of functioning pre-diagnosis, whereas for others it is about going further and discovering new possibilities. It’s also clear that recovery is not a hasty process but one that can occur over a number of years. I am based at St Mungo’s for five months in total, giving me a mere snapshot into the lives of some of the people I am working with.
So perhaps when using the words ‘difficult to engage’ to describe someone, what that really means is that the service just hasn’t found the right way to engage that particular person yet. Mental health is complicated and needs an individual approach: what works for one person may not for another. As I try to introduce new activities and innovations to the service, the onus is on me to listen carefully to the needs of each client and understand how I can help them to engage, not to simply expect that they will.
Some final thoughts
It is still early days for me at St Mungo’s and I have much more to learn about mental health, but the realisation that small goals can achieve larger progress has been a vital one. The projects that I try to put in place at St Mungo’s may not be on the same scale as I had originally envisioned, but might instead be useful stepping stones for building or restoring hope. Mental health recovery does not occur overnight and neither does social innovation but the important thing with both is to keep going, keep listening, and not to give up.
