Morris - The lived experience in mental health

The Lived Experience in Mental Health

The Lived Experience in Mental Health

Gary Morris

Nursing Lecturer, University of Leeds, UK

CRC Press

Taylor & Francis Group

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Version Date: 20160603

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To

Herta Kgler ein wahrer Held

and

Emily, Daisy and Caitlin

Lottie, William and Sam

With much love

Contents

There are a number of people whom I need to thank without whom I would never have finished (or indeed started) this work.

My wife Emily who has been an invaluable support. Your intuitiveness, insight and creativity have been a major boost to the shaping and structuring of this work.

The many service users and carers who permitted me to access and share their narratives. You are truly experts by experience.

My colleagues Anne Lawton, Julia Turner, Gordon Teal, Shupikai Rinomhota and Nicola Clibbens. Thanks for sharing resources and ideas and allowing me to learn from your experience.

The nursing students who have been involved with this work and engaged with a number of the narratives. You have been fantastic ambassadors showing the difference that lived experience learning can have for practice.

Barry-Percy Smith and Christine Rhodes. Your timely supervision and productive guidance have kept me grounded and focused with regard to the learning strategy featured in this work.

The supportive publishing staff, especially Naomi Wilkinson, Jennifer Blaise, Grace McInness and Vijay Bose. Your help and guidance has been much welcomed.

Thanks to all of you!

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 9

This work is concerned with what it feels like to live with and experience mental health problems. It covers a broad spectrum of experience addressing the internal component of thoughts and emotions. This provides a contextual understanding of a persons daily experiences, encountered difficulties, coping approaches and available support networks. There is a clear need for healthcare professionals and learners to become more aware of and tuned in to the lived and felt experience of those they are engaged with in practice. The importance of this is the promotion of a more caring culture as the more we know about others, the more meaningful and effective our engagement with them becomes. The mental health practitioners role is built upon core qualities including empathy, genuineness and trust and the ability to develop effective therapeutic relationships. This is built around our ability to appreciate what mental health experience means to a person as well as developing an awareness of what it feels like. This understanding relates to a persons mental health experience as well as their experience of care. It importantly helps clinicians have better awareness as to why, for example, a person might be struggling to comply with help offered because of problems with medication side effects or anxiety around starting psychological therapies. The contextualisation of this experience allows us to better appreciate difficulties a person is experiencing and reframe from an internal perspective what might otherwise be regarded as challenging behaviours. Acknowledging and appreciating this enables us to respond more appropriately and support people more effectively.

It needs to be noted that the range of mental health lived experience is vast. The work presented here makes no claims about reflecting the totality of this experience or even a small fraction as each person, out of the billions of people affected with mental health issues, will have their own unique narrative to relate. It also needs noting that given the space available in this text and the level of analysis desired, only a select number of mental health issues are featured. These primarily focus upon anxiety, depression, bipolar, psychosis and dementia. Whilst these have been separated out and examined separately within distinct chapters, it needs understanding that in reality there are multiple points of overlap between them. As indicated, this work does not intend to comprehensively understand mental health experience but instead promote thought and encourage a more reflective and questioning approach to practice.