Pathways to Recovery
Service User Charmain Smith talks of the role that day services and editing a newsletter have played in her recovery journey.
Pathways Day Services is based in Mirfield, West Yorkshire and caters for adults who experience mental health difficulties. I've been attending Pathways for about five years now and would like to share with you how it helps me to cope and, on occasion, thrive.
The first group I attended at Pathways back in 2001 was a 'creative writing' group. At the time I wasn't able to appreciate that I'd been referred to this activity to help me engage with people and society beyond the relatively reclusive circumstances I'd found myself in. I was unfulfilled by the next group I attended and stopped going for a couple years. During this time I became more reclusive. However, I continued to be visited at home by a social worker and started psycho-therapy. I also begin to rekindle my interest in 'haikus'. Haikus are 17 syllable poems, the format of which I was introduced to when I first went to Pathways. In addition to my home visits and therapy I found that these bite sized poems were helping me to piece myself back together. So much so that I developed a desire to publish some poetry with my own photographic illustrations. I knew that Pathways ran a graphic design group and so asked to be re-referred.
On this occasion I appreciated that Pathways was giving me the opportunity to establish relationships with people that understand and that I can share things with. Importantly it gave me the opportunity to establish these relationships in healthy strides. That is, because I met the people I felt I could in time form a bond with, in a structured environment, I didn't feel the tendency to envelope my self in their life or them in mine. This is something I've done in the past when I've felt a glimmer of a bond with someone. And more often then not this has led to negative outcomes that have put more of a strain on forming healthy bonds in the future. I was determined to use Pathways in this healthy way because I knew that with the progress I was making I wouldn't have home visits or be in therapy forever.
As a means of putting the whole publication desire together, in addition to the graphic design group, I joined the photography and Frontline magazine groups. As time passed I felt able to attend college to learn more about these matters. This has led to me playing a key role in the production of Frontline. Since it began to produced back in 2001, Frontline has provided the opportunity for Service Users to offer their perspective on services, recovery personal interests and hobbies. Over the past couple of years it has evolved into a more professional production that is run entirely by Service Users.
Pathways is now giving me the opportunity to put skills into practice in a meaningful, practical and autonomous way. It really is autonomous in the sense that, if Service Users didn't produce Frontline, it's most likely that it wouldn't get done. One of the reasons being staff resources. Another being that, regardless of how much insight their training gives them, staff can't talk about things from a Service User perspective.
Apart from a sense of ownership over an activity, one of the most important things I get out of Frontline it is working as a team. Being left entirely to my own devices to see the process of something through is really not healthy for me. As a team we brain storm the questions for interviews, take the pictures, do the graphic design, go through the printing process at the printers and distribute the end result.
I can't understate how tough, challenging and exasperating producing Frontline can be at times but that's where being in a supportive environment comes into things.
February 2008
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