Experts By ExperienceBecky AldridgeChief Executive

Dorset Mental Health ForumCo-Lead Dorset Wellbeing and

Recovery Partnership

Dorset Wellbeing and Recovery Partnership

• Partnership of lived experience expertise alongside professional expertise.

• WaRP established May 2009, putting people with lived experience of mental health problems at the heart of service design, training and delivery.

• Dorset Mental Health Forum – peer run recovery orientated organisation, local employer, strategic partner, advocacy, consultation, representation.

• Development of local lived experience infrastructure, opportunity to reframe experiences, peer mentoring.

Defining Recovery …..

“Probably the most useful way of understanding recovery is linking it to our own experience because it is something that is common to all of us; it is not specific to mental health problems.

Any of us, who have been through a divorce, being made unemployed, a major illness or bereavement, know that that changes us; there is no way to going back to how we were before that event.

We have to incorporate that into our way of living and we learn from that and move on with that, which is exactly what we are talking about in terms of recovery from mental health problems…….

…….. Recovery is about taking back control over your own life and your own problems, about not seeing your problems as being uncontrollable, or that their control is just the province of experts.

It is about understanding yourself what is possible and what you

can do to help yourself.”

By Dr Repper from An independent investigation into the care and treatment of Daniel Gonzales (January 2009) p. 124.

Five Year Forward View for Mental Health

Call for: Right help, right time, right way. Reduction of stigma; mentally healthy communities Empowering people experiencing mental health problems. Equal status of mental health and physical health.“If I’d had the help in my teens that I finally got in my thirties, I wouldn’t have lost my twenties.” = Accept emotional distress as part of being human?

Our Journey Together ……

Establishing buy-in to Wellbeing and Personal Recovery principles as concepts. Building the Recovery contagion. Understanding the principles of Coproduction.

Scale and nature of the task for the organisation.

Demonstrating the value and inspiration of lived experience expertise and the successful development of partnership working. Dominance of clinical recovery. Power struggles.

The introduction of Peer Specialists and Recovery Education Centre. Change at the periphery but not at the core?

Parallel process of recovery journeys of individuals, teams and organisations. Engaging commissioners.

Co-Production

“ Co-production means delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours. Where activities are co-produced in this way, both services and neighbourhoods become far more effective agents of change.”

(Boyle and Harris, 2010)

Why are Peer workers important?

“People in recovery know three very important things:

1. The ways in which mental health systems currently help people.2. Ways in which mental health systems currently fail and harm

people.3. Ways in which mental health systems could be better at educating,

engaging and supporting people and their loved ones in their own recovery journeys

If we can invite, value and benefit from their accumulated wisdom, ideas and energy, we might be able to create together a system that is more accessible, respectful and responsive to all those in need.”

Peer Support in Mental Health: Exploitive, Transformative, or Both?Larry Davidson, Sept 2014

Peer workers introduced with range of reassurances. Support mechanisms, supervision, capacity. Being a critical friend …… Challenging practice / language / perception. Celebrating good practice, making staff feel valued. Peer workers act as a bridge between staff and people

who access services …. more difficult if peers are staff.

Peer Workers in Services

.

The Importance of Recovery Education

“We can’t solve problems with the same

thinking that created them..”Einstein

Thank You …

Further information:

www.dorsetmentalhealthforum.org.uk

beckyaldridge@dorsetmentalhealthforum.org.uk