Recovery Champions: A Personal View on Making Recovery Happen.

Rethink Mental Illness Having a mental health problem can be a frightening, isolating, and even terrifying experience. Seeing things and hearing voices can be disturbing and carry with them stigma and exclusion from ordinary human relationships, employment, and even simple things that are taken for granted like socializing, going out, or making friends. One person I knew in hospital saw people covered in snakes, while another saw people on fire. I myself have heard threatening and taunting voices, saying: " You wait until you see what I'm going to do to you! " Too often, people can withdraw into themselves and be cut off from others, even from close family members and carers. This is not helped when seeing things and hearing voices are labeled as " hallucinations " to be dismissed and ignored. Having a mental health problem also has " negative symptoms " such as tiredness, loss of emotion, and apathy. This is not helped by the undesirable side effects of many antipsychotic drugs, which may cause tremors, tiredness , uncontrollable shaking, dribbling, apathy, and weight gain. I can say from personal experience that these side effects are often humiliating, embarrassing, and painful. People with mental illness can withdraw into themselves and become passive, a shell, a shadow of their former self, and almost zombielike. People can end up just going through the motions of life in an empty and hollow way. According to Ron Coleman and Karen Taylor, who have run the Recovery Champions course in places as diverse as Scotland, Australia, Italy, and Palestine, making recovery happen is about learning to live again and not just exist as a shadow in some sort of half-life. Rather than running away from the pain and difficulty of living with a mental health problem and withdrawing from life, people are positively encouraged to discuss their voices and difficult experiences. People's voices and experiences are treated as real (at least to the individual experiencing them), so this means they are treated as valid and meaningful. Rather than ignoring and dismissing hearing voices, a recovery coach talks to the person about hearing voices (what the voice says, if it is male or female, whether it advises or is commanding, its age, and whether it is positive or negative). In other words, the voice is mapped so that it can be better understood. Rather than giving up with life and the pain …