You will never convince me that we have yet come to terms with the crushing burden of mental health.
For years... the forgotten Cinderella of our health services. Why?
My guess; it goes back a long way. To the time when we knew very little about mental illness, we had few tools in the medicine box an even less in the way of cures. People were incarcerated.
That's when the word 'asylum' took on a whole different meaning. Refuge, sanctuary, shelter, peace and protection... asylum became synonymous with lunatics, madness and locking people away.
We hid people with mental illness. In the unacceptable language of the 50's and 60's people were 'housed in bins'.
You can't imagine someone with a sore hip being warehoused; for their own protection, in case they fell over.
I'd like to say a lot has changed. I'm not sure I can. Some things have changed. Mental health hospitals have changed into acute units, more services delivered in the community and there is a better understanding of what lies behind the invisible illnesses that strike people and their families.
Cognitive therapy, behaviour therapy, group therapy, psychotherapy, ECT and psychopharmacology. How much have we moved on?
Looking at the history of the treatments for mental health, is a pretty gloomy picture. More recently leading edge advances with the use of magnets (TMS), some better drugs, talking therapies, certainly.
Stereotypes, stigma, prejudice still play their ugly part despite the fact that MH is one of the main causes of the disease burden world-wide. One in 6 experience a common mental disorder and goodness knows how many of us are followed by the Black Dog.
Most of the Asylums have closed, one of the last; Bracebridge in Lincoln. Of the 735 patients treated there, 134 were from Grimsby. That's almost 20% all coming from the same town - there must be a reason for such an anomaly. Somehow mental health data gets sidelined.
Interesting because I was in Grimsby this week. I was visiting a garden centre. I do love a garden centre! The smells and the cornucopia of gadgets and bits and pieces, bizarre garden ornaments.
The jumpers with leather elbows and of course flowers and the seedlings struggling to deliver their promise, stacked on racks. There is something very English about a garden centre.
In the bustling-busy restaurant I had a fish and chip lunch. Well, you can't go to Grimsby and not have fish-n-chips... even though it probably comes in a container from Iceland. Grimsby is missing its industrial-fishing past and overshadowed by the attention its neighbour, Hull, is attracting as a future City of Culture.
That said it is one of the few places to have a manicured municipal park with a beauty centre, cafe, cacti, pond and ducks!
The huge bustling garden centre and the topiary'd park are run by NAViGO. They were NELincs MH Services, via a PCT spin out, they are now a social enterprise.
They also own a gardening and building maintenance business, they are about to open a driving school and a carpet reclamation business. Staff are partners, patients in recovery employed and developed.
The innovative, ingenious and thoroughly fabulous NAViGO understand the three pillars of public health:
A safe place to live,
a job
and someone to love.
They own apartments, create communities and piece by piece, carefully reassemble the components of shattered lives and glue them together with skills, care, attention and tuff-love.
The acute team is the community team, is the crisis team. I couldn't tell who was health and who was social care, who were staff, clients, partners and people working towards recovery.
The thoughtful dementia services have a lovely feel to them; night staff wear pyjamas to reinforce, 'it's bed time'! Relatives can stay the night.
Holistic doesn't quite do it. Integrated, comprehensive, maybe. More like entwined. Services entwined with peoples lives, families, hopes and futures. And, it works.
T
hey do all this because as a Social Enterprise, they can and they have the courage, will and inspiration.
Without the burden of regulation and the led weight the
NHS invents for itself, they do it because they know the pathway to recovery, for so many, involves confidence, training and a job they can do.
MH services have come a long way... in Grimsby.