Reclaiming Our Hope and Power In Mental Health Despair

I've been following a large UK mental health group on Facebook recently and I notice something:

About a third of the posts are people saying they have no hope because they're not receiving "services" from the NHS.

Another third are people saying they are receiving "services" but aren't sorted out by "services" so have no hope.

The other third are about other things.

Three possible things needed to alleviate this Catch-22 of mental health despair. All of them are needed:

A. Sort out the services. Obviously there are too many problems with staffing levels, funding, waiting lists and everything else. It has to be recognised though that even with overwhelmingly massive funding increases there still wouldn't be enough services to deal with all the pain in our society

B. Societal change. The most difficult of the three possibilities Given that most mental health distress arises from societal issues, complex and simple, and from direct trauma we need governmental policies and societal changes that seek to minimise those causes, thus decreasing the mental health crisis our society is experiencing. Our government, by continuing to make political choices for poverty and inequality, isn't doing that.

C. Teach people that services and the medical model aren't necessarily the way and that handing such power and responsibility to others is usually not a good thing. Empower people. Teach them their own autonomy and strength, their innate worth and meaning. Grant them the space for radical self acceptance. Sometimes services are geared to that, through forms of psychology not psychiatry, sometimes not. It's very hard to learn to cope with yourself while yourself is powerfully masked or crushed by drugs as it is in the words of many in that group. It's also hard to do while experiencing mental health distress. However, it can be done, given much patience and determination.

I'm worried that so many people are taught, repeatedly, that hope is to be found only through psych services and that they invest so much in hope in those services, hope that's very often ruined, leaving them with nothing. It's as if psychiatry is the new Jesus and has become prophet, priest and king for these people. The medical model has too often stopped being just a model and become a religion, sometimes with fundamentalist adherents. As a religion it may have more powerful bread and wine in its drugs but in many ways it offers less than the communities inspired by the old gods.

I'm also saddened by it as I see the writings of people every single day who aren't coping at all well and I know they are not in a position to hear "you can become your own teacher and wisdom" because that's a difficult conclusion to reach even when you're not in severe mental health distress. Saddened as people I will never meet struggle, often struggle to stay alive. I know that struggle too well.

Most of them though want to hear that the NHS will cure them and I couldn't give that assurance even if NHS services were ideal and even if I knew they'd benefit from the worthwhile skills gained in trauma therapy or DBT or whatever else they are on a massive waiting list to receive.

I can give space in which it's okay to be hurting. I can give assurance that a person, underneath pain, is beautiful. I can give assurance that a person has undiscovered power and wisdom. I can, very fallibly, encourage a person that they're much stronger than they think and can navigate to their own answers. Not my answers. Not an "expert's" answers. Their answers. I can provide cups of tea too!

But I can and will never assurance that anyone else can remove their distress. I find too often that this is the assurance people want, not to learn that they're amazing beings who can become free.

While we may all need some help, in the end we have to remove our distress ourselves, sometimes by changing our lives often by acceptance rather than divorce. Sometimes we cannot remove the source of our distress. We just have to radically accept and in that place, paradoxically, there's often a greater chance of change.

In the end, healing and recovery are primarily from within. We've been conditioned to sell our hope and power to others. To reclaim hope and power is hard. But it is possible.

As for me, I'm still reclaiming. I'm not all the way yet and perhaps the learning will never end. The struggles are still there and heaven knows I'd still qualify for a range of psychiatric diagnoses! It is possible though.

It is all possible.

It is all achievable.

Within the confines and restrictions of the external world we can truly be free within our own minds, just as Victor Frankl, the Stoics and so many others discovered and proclaimed long before I ever wrote my first annoying Facebook or blog post.