About Us
This blog is a shared project between some of the DCC-i crew and our friends, colleagues and contacts who walk the line between being a health or social care professional and having the mentals…
We are a group of ‘isms’ , just the same as the people we support in our professional lives. This blog is intended as a place to share our thoughts, experiences, political leanings and anything else that infuriates, needs challenging or just needs to be called out for the smoke and mirrors that it is, across the mental health sphere (and yes that does include drug services too).
When services talk about people with lived experience (PWLE) they are talking about not just the experience of the condition, or illness or whatever flavour ism it happens to be, but also the experience of being in services.
Services and helpers are supposed to support self-determination but in so many cases perpetuate the iatrogenic harm. We have launched this blog to say - us too - and to admit that often we are really are just making it up as we go along (hopefully with empathy, information, education and compassion).
Professionals are human and the one-in-four (or whatever archaic measures that are currently being thrown around) applies to us too. So this blog is a project from those of us who are both ‘out’ and those who aren’t. Anyone wanting to share anonymously are both safe and welcome in this space.
We are aiming to level the playing field and challenge some of the particularly bad examples of the use of power by professionals - by saying 'us too' and 'no it isnt good enough'.
Much of the experience is shared and common regardless of which side of the patient/professional fence you sit on – the pain, the stigma, the shame, the utter frustration with our modern mental health system, but some of it is different. For professionals who end up in our services, the power dynamics are different, the responses of staff sometimes different, but the othering and labelling we experience is just as real and many are reluctant to speak out as a result.
The aim of this blog is to challenge the ideas and artificial divisions between who is seen as ‘them’ and who is seen as ‘us’ (and when), and to spread the mantra of there is huge value in just being a nice human.
We are of the view that being present and validating the inner pain of another person once in a while would make for much better services, its not that hard… really it isn’t!