Living With Trauma: The Healers, 9

Empowering the disempowered. Or maybe getting them to empower themselves? I think that could depend on a number of different variables. I have already mentioned that those who have spent much of their adult lives as recipients of mental health services are not going to be much motivated for doing anything. I would even go as far as to say that a few of them, if they could get away with it, would happily have others wipe their asses for them. This rather reminds me of a favourite joke of my father's: There was a little chickadee who was flying south for the winter. Suddenly the wind began to blow, the snow started to fall and the little chickadee was too exhausted to continue, so he let himself fall to the earth where he landed in a big pile of horse shit. The little chickadee sank down deep into the horse shit and, feeling warm and safe, decided to fall asleep and there he slept for the entire winter, till spring arrived. With the first rays of the warming sun, the snow thawed and the chickadee awoke, poked his little head up through the horse shit and sang out, "Chickadee! Chickadee!" Then suddenly a seagull descended and bit off his little head. Now, there are three morals to this little story: 1. It is not necessarily your best friend who gets you into shit. 2. It isn't necessarily your best friend who's going to get you out of shit. So, number 3, if you find yourself in shit, but you're also warm, safe and comfortable, then stay there and enjoy it. I don't necessarily agree with this little story, as I was not likely to agree with much of what my father had to say. But I think this is a rather astute description of what can happen to what we could call the professional mental health consumer: which is to say, people who have spent so much of their lives in various stages of mental illness and mental health treatment that their lives have come to be defined by both their illness and the mental health system. This is their life, their reality. This is their comfort zone, where they feel safe and at home. And you challenge them at your peril. I first discovered how difficult it can be working with clients attuned to the Medical Model when we want to grandfather them towards recovery. As one former colleague once put it, it is for them a foreign country. It is scary and threatening. It isn't just a matter of their medications, since in the Recovery Model psychotropic medications are every bit as key in mental health treatment, though perhaps they don't quite occupy centre stage. And the mental health consumers are not to be blamed. So frightening and overwhelming are the symptoms of mental illness, from hearing voices, to paranoid delusions, extreme mood swings, depression, anxiety and everything in between, that they are going to gladly welcome any support, any soothing comfort, whatever soporific that can make their lives even a little bit more tolerable. It is already vastly too late to intervene and take preventative measures because the damage has been already done. What is left is usually damage control. Often it is enough simply to coach them into being their own advocates, or helping them to engage a little bit more in the community: volunteer work, accessing public transit, learning to shop for their own food, accessing programs and activities, or simply learning to be comfortable enough to go walking outside in public. I still believe that with sufficient patient and compassionate support that some real healing and recovery can begin to happen for many of these people. They have, for the most part, never felt valued or really respected and I think that this is really key to starting the long journey towards mental health recovery. Our mental health services, such as they are, are not sufficient to provide this, especially if there is no family, nor other loved ones, available to help and support. Only those workers who really care and love enough can help with this, those who are not just in the industry for the paycheque. Fortunately, there are many of us who fit that bill, though our system of care delivery is often so constructed and structured as to make it very difficult for appropriate care and support to be consistently delivered. Not to mention that not all clients are going to rise to the challenge of moving forward unless they can be somehow persuaded that the risk of recovery and the uncertainty that comes with it are going to be worth the effort. It always comes back to the willingness of the client and in the meantime we do what we must, what we can, to continue blowing on those still-warm coals, hoping that the first little spark will set in motion the fire that will move them forward.