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To mark World Mental Health Day today, Mind Jersey CEO Patricia Tumelty has shared her thoughts on running a mental health charity – and why, sometimes, the biggest achievements are those we cannot see or measure in any tangible way.
Listening to the key findings of the Grenfell Tower inquiry seven years on reminds me of some of the fears or worries I have heading up a mental health charity.
The Grenfell report highlights the risks of turning a blind eye to injustices carried out against marginalised groups of people. Many of the people Mind Jersey support are also isolated and ignored for no other reason than for having a mental illness.
Standing up for what's right and telling or reminding people who are in charge what's what is easier said than done. Activism or calling our injustice and confronting authority requires courage.
Today, in an attempt to do this, I am drawing on the work of the journalist and political activist George Monbiot who describes how the Global Mind Project has found that mental wellbeing in the UK continues to plummet further than any comparable nation – and shows no signs of recovery.
As we celebrate World Mental Health Day it's important to consider why this is, and how we in Jersey as an island rank globally in respect to wellbeing, mental health and metal illness?
I know there is no money tree hiding anywhere and that there are people trying to raise standards in mental health services across the public and voluntary sector.
One of my concerns links with the current angle on reporting of outcomes measures. Questions such as 'how much did we do?' and 'how well did we do it?' leave no way of considering or accounting for what social justice campaigner Vikki Reynolds describes as ‘unhappenings’ [the things you can't measure because they don't happen].
Dignity and respect, she says, are immeasurable; 'doing dignity', 'structuring safety', and 'unhappenings' are unmeasurable. [They are] the things that didn’t happen because a worker gave a kind, dignified word or a look to someone on the edge of despair.
Examples of so-called 'unhappenings' at Mind Jersey can be seen daily in the impact of kind, respectful, dignified words to people often ignored through stigma and health inequalities.
The contentment and trust I see in the body language of a person seeking support and linked up with a peer support worker reminds me sometimes that the best of our work is often about what we cannot see or measure.
Activism for Mind Jersey, today and everyday, means treating people with dignity and respect, and is at the heart of our mental health peer support services.
'Doing dignity' is something so important and so fundamental, yet is often absent in report writing.
Treating people fairly and equally is often so difficult to hold on to in performance-driven processes where everyone and everything that moves has a price and a code.
Over many decades of working in the field of mental health, one of the key things I have learned is that exciting polices sitting on shelves, often written following reviews such as Grenfell do not save lives; people save lives.
Patricia Tumelty, CEO, Mind Jersey
