A service-user’s view – no ‘one right way’ to get better

Speaking on Day Two of the DIMH 2015 conference was Ian Callaghan, a long-standing user of mental health services, who is now the national service-user lead for My Shared Pathway and Recovery and Outcomes in secure mental health, a role that sees him co-ordinate and facilitate the nine Regional Recovery and Outcomes Groups. These groups ‘provide a place for service-users, staff, and commissioners to come together to share best practice and to stimulate developments in secure care’. Also a patient reviewer for the Quality Network for Forensic Mental Health Services of the Royal College of Psychiatrists – which undertakes peer-led reviews of medium and low secure services – he is a patient representative for the High/Medium and Low Secure Clinical Reference Groups of NHS England.

Opening his presentation, Ian Callaghan said: “My own perspective comes from having been a patient in a secure hospital. I spent just under five years, from 2007-2012, in the hospital and its ‘rehab’ unit. I have been discharged from hospitals for about three years, and the project I have been involved with has been really important to my recovery since leaving hospital.”

Ian Callaghan explained that his experiences of mental health ‘went much further back’ than 2007, however. He said: “When I was 23, I had my first episode of what turned out to be a bipolar disorder. I was at a meeting the other day when a life coach described how she uses images to support people to move on. She had what she dubbed ‘a mood elevator’, which she drew on a flip chart, and I recognised that I spend most of my time in the basement, and occasionally the penthouse suite, which is paradoxically a more difficult place to be.”