Living With Trauma: The Healers,8

It seems to me that there are some huge social inequalities that are inherent to our mental health services. I have often noticed how all of my coworkers, save for myself and some other peer support workers have at least five years of completed post-secondary education, and many now have (and require) their masters. Among the recipients of our services it is going to be quite a different story. Out of nine clients I am currently working with, two are university graduates. This is not an unusual statistic, Gentle Reader. And by the way, even with all my lovely writing and high-falutin language and dextrous use of English, your loyal scribe here just squeezed past less than two years of community college. The vast majority of our mental health professionals come from a position of privilege. This isn't to say that their lives are perfect or trouble free. You wouldn't believe all the heart-breaking First World Problems I have heard about in the staff room. On the other hand, some of them do go through there own legitimate life crises: death of loved ones, cancer, accident-related injuries, burnout, and their own emotional and mental health stresses and problems such as which rarely see the light of day. But for them there is still plenty of support, ballast and infrastructure so that none of them will ever themselves end up as clients in the system, even if they do get diagnosed with a mental illness. They are not vulnerable like the rest of us. So, this is not in any way a conspiracy, rather just the way the cards fall in an unequal society. It is also true that a lot of people cannot finish their post-secondary education because of mental illness, given that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (the two biggies) generally don't begin to surface till the late teens and early twenties, when most people who will have the good fortune of having access to a university or college education will be most likely to be enrolled. I sometimes wonder if this could be why both these mental health situations tend to be overrepresented in our mental health services. No matter which way we look at it, our publically funded mental health services really show a vastly disempowered and vulnerable population, many of who appear to lack the skills, life-skills and education to be able to play an appropriate role in their own problem-solving and recovery. Add to this how much the old Medical Model of mental health care still seems to hang over us like a cold grey shadow and we will have a better idea of why many clients remain so chronically dependent on services and so unlikely to ever really recover. We could also consider our own flawed model of recovery, based more on creating socially-conformist consumers of material and market goods and services than fully self-actualized persons who can adequately steer their own lives and actually challenge and help change this inadequate system of mental health care and services. How to empower our people is another story, and this I will try to address and explore promptly, Gentle Reader.