CMHC has been meeting monthly with researchers from the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioural Sciences at The Royal Free Campus of The Royal Free and University College Hospital School of Medicine for more than a year now. This has allowed there to be both some information about the research that is being undertaken available to service users and some input from service users into research proposals. Some of this has been fed back through the medium of the North Camden User Forum.

One of the first projects that CMHC wanted to be involved in was research into the stigma associated with mental illness. This is something which service-users are always commenting on and which has been studied in some depth, but not from their viewpoint. It is not at all clear what effect stigma has on relapse and many of the other areas of mental health problems, but service users know well that it does affect many aspects of their lives. Knowing more about it might provide ways of dealing with it. Camden Social Services made a grant of £20 000 towards a pilot study whilst money is being sough for a major piece of research on the topic. In May, Chris Bagley will begin this part of the study and he will be having close contact with CMHC and service users.

Many people were interested when Dr Mark Serfaty came to talk about an investigation on the sexual attitudes of in-patients, but this has yet to find any funding.

User Review & Mental Health Act Debate

The User Event Review and the Mental Health Act Debate were held at Hampstead Town Hall on Tuesday, 27 March. It was a successful afternoon in the first part of which several service users were able to express their views on what they thought ‘user involvement’ meant and how it could be best be developed. It was just a pity that there were not more service users present. The main points that came out of the User Event held in November 2000 were summarised as COMMUNICATION, TRAINING, and INFORMATION. Not surprisingly, these are seen as universal organisational weaknesses and in that sense user involvement is no worse off. The views from this review and the Draft Report by Advocacy Really Works on the original November User Event will now be amalgamated to produce a final Report that will be circulated in the Summer.

Erville Millar, the Chief Executive of the new Camden & Islington NHS Mental Health Trust, attended the event and spoke briefly about his own views on user involvement and the philosophy of the new Trust. CMHC

was pleased to welcome him there and we hope to be seeing him regularly in the coming months.

Paul, one of the Development Workers working on the Crisis House Report told people what an enjoyable and exciting experience it had been and how he felt that people responded better in the interviews when they realised that they were talking to other service users.

The second part of the afternoon had the arguments for and against the proposed new Mental Health Act put by two psychiatrists who work in the community. Dr Trevor Turner took the view that the proposals would actually give more rights to detained patients and that it would make his job somewhat easier and less bureaucratic. Dr George Szmukler took the opposite view and considered that the new restrictions would make matters worse. Neither doctor liked the second part of the White Paper which concerns itself with ‘dangerousness’, and both thought that if that became law then it would be very difficult for all concerned. Dr Szmukler was able to give an entertaining an elegant reasoning of why predicting dangerousness is never really going to be accurate.

Spring Party & Disco

Last year CMHC started putting together some social contacts for people and there were a couple of parties and discos. The Christmas Party held at Lyndhurst Hall was a success and so we have decided that we should do it again for the Spring.

The party on Friday, 11 May is going to be held in the Function Room of The Celeste Pub at 256 Kentish Town Road. It will start at 8.00 pm and run through until midnight. There will be free food with a Pay Bar. Hugh will be the DJ and he invites people to bring along any CD that they would like him to add to the tunes of the 60s, 70s and 80s that he will be spinning. Come along and enjoy yourselves.

If this party is another success then CMHC can consider other social events and we would be interested to have any ideas or suggestions that people may want to pass on to us.

There can be no doubt that the first ‘Real Work for Real Pay’ project in which CMHC was involved has been a success. The Development Workers have all said how much they enjoyed the experience and they have produced an elegant report. This will be recognised by a public launch and possibly by publishing the Report on the internet, either on the CMHC website or the User Information Website which is being considered as a possibility.

The Kings Fund has made some money available to University College London to investigate the experience of people using the mental health services in Camden and Islington. This is being done in the form of User Focussed Monitoring and a pilot project has been undertaken in the Waterlow Unit at The Whittington Hospital through the Waterlow Unit Patients’ Council.

The study is being extended first to St Luke’s Hospital Woodside then to the other inpatient and community services. CMHC will be collaborating in this project with UCL, the Waterlow Unit Patients’ Council and other groups and agencies. The first task will be to recruit, train and support six service users from Camden and Islington to help develop and employ a questionnaire seeking the experiences of people leaving the in-patient units at St Lukes, analyse the information obtained and produce a report. It is hoped that we will be able to build up a team of service users who can be trained and supported to take on these tasks both this time and in the future. There seems every likelihood that there will be more of them coming along.

Open Support Group

The comments of our members both personally and in surveys led us to believe that they would value an Open Support Group – a safe place to talk.

Although this does not sound too difficult a task, it took us quite some time to find a professional therapist who would take it on. We introduced it last year as part of the ‘CMHC at Tottenham Mews’ sessions and we ran six monthly meetings.

We discontinued it for a number of reasons – the cost coupled with the low attendance and the problem of being a user group and then providing a service. When the group broke up, its members expressed their disappointment and asked if we would consider starting it up again in the future.

In the months since it ended, the CMHC Management Committee has considered it several times and thought that it was a valuable group, but that there were problems around funding it, particularly if only a few people ever came. However, the discussions that we have been having have proved successful and we are now in a position to restart the Open Support Group with the same therapist ‘Tony’.

The Group will now be held in the evenings and the same conditions will apply, people can come along and take part if they want to. There are no conditions except that of respect both for the other members of the group and the material that is discussed. There is no commitment – just because you attend one group, you do not have to keep on going if you do not want to. There is no referral procedure – people can just turn up.

Although it is intended that the Group will run for a year to see if it is successful or not, this is conditional on a reasonable take up. The Group will be reviewed after three or four months and if it just isn’t attracting people then it will probably be abandoned. It will be there for people to use, but if they do not use it then it is unlikely to be continued.

We are hoping to be able to say some more about the new paid work that CMHC will be involved in.

Camden Council’s Social Services Committee’s Mental Health Liaison Group meets quarterly and is part of the democratic process of feeding back user and carers experience to Councillors. It is Chaired by Councillor Penny Abraham who is also an appointee on CMHC’s Management Committee.

Robin Gandy is presently a fitness instructor at Swiss Cottage Sports Centre and he came along to the April meeting of the North Camden User Forum to talk about fitness and health and how exercise of any sort can make you feel better. It is surprising what a little activity will do for people and there is some evidence that it will actually improve the endorphin level in the brain and thus tend to combat depression. Young or old it can help. Just because you have not done any exercise since you were at school does not mean that you cannot start now nor does it mean that you have to have the strength and stamina of a green beret. A little walking is a good start. If you are more interested in becoming fit then there are exercises that you can do and build up and these will take you to where you want to be.

People in Camden can make use of the Council’s Sports Centres and there are courses of instruction which people can join to learn about diet and exercise. It’s worthwhile, will make you feel better and may prolong your life.

Following Robin there was a short presentation from some of the Development Workers who had been involved in the Crisis House Research. They talked about how rewarding the project had been in a number of ways and how they had enjoyed working together and producing the final report. They were convinced that the fact that they were all users of the mental health service had played a significant role in the project.

Keith Russell was going to come along to the April meeting and talk about the work that is being done in North Camden Mental Health Services in collaboration with NDC, CMHC and the Mind Advocacy Service at The Royal Free Hospital, to try and establish Patients’ Councils in the in-patient units on level 2 and at Felix Brown and The West Hampstead Day Hospitals. There have been several meetings of the project group and there is now a template which is likely to be used for setting up the Councils. Keith will be coming to the May meeting of the NCUF on Tuesday, 1^st May to talk about the development work that has been done and how the process will now be taken forward to set up the Councils, what they will be for and how they will work.

The meeting started with Colin Plant, the Locality Director for South Camden Mental Health Services, explaining that his service recognised the importance of the SCUF and would in future offer the attendance of a management team member to feedback any points which were raised and needed to be dealt with.

Kate Crosby is an advocate in the forensic unit of a West London Hospital. She has the unusual advantage of being a service user and this allows her to understand a great deal more about how the people she advocates for/with experience matters.

Kate was the speaker at the May meeting of the South Camden User Forum and her first and fundamental point was that her responsibility is to the client or ‘partner’ as she deems them. She is also most keen to put the partner in a position where she no longer needs to be there and they feel empowered enough to advocate for themselves.

Several points were made about the need for training so that advocacy was not such a lonely road along which the advocate often had to discover things for themselves and this ties in with the Government’s recognition of the needs for advocacy and commitment in the Mental Health Act White Paper to provide it for all detained patients.