It is fourteen years since I worked at the Devonport CAB with the other individuals who had the drive to deliver a service that would help the Devonport locals deal with the problems they had. It may help to characterise the period by describing the political context of the time before discussing the issues that I wanted to raise. There was an almost nonchalant right wing government that may have been possibly so little concerned with the bottom 10% of earners in the public that they damaged Conservatism irreparably. There were the major events of the Poll Tax riots and the riots at the protests over the end of student grants. And, although there was the launch of Heseltine’s urban regeneration initiative there were strong signals from central government that the areas that experienced multiple-deprivation somehow didn’t matter. I was influenced to undertake the role of CAB advice worker because of the Maoist philosopher & Newcastle Brown Ale drinker – Tim Moss, who encouraged the action of voluntary work in deprived urban areas which isn’t quite as dramatic an undertaking as doing voluntary work overseas in some far off land to most people, though need may be great in deprived urban Britain. There was a tendency back then to elect left wing local councils as a reaction to the right wing central government as perhaps there may currently be a tendency to elect right wing councils in order to give a message to left-wing central government. It wasn’t my first job but delivering CAB Advice Work was the first work I made a serious attempt at engaging in employment since I’d graduated a year or so before. Before that I’d been involved in various service delivery jobs and not been able to do what any of my education was geared towards. I did find it quite a difficult transition to make - I guess I’d spent too much of my teens loafing. There was a degree of conviction that is not uncommon in the voluntary sector all over the UK within Devonport CAB’s team. Ironically, I had ongoing issues with depression and no real diagnosis which attempted to deal with the matters which underlie the swift changes in mood that left me occasionally feeling very typically helpless.
The reason I write this blog relates to the experience I had when I saw at least two of clients who appeared to be reporting conspiratorial matters. I didn’t really know how to take them in relation to the issues they were raising - if anything I would have to offer some form of apology to the people I assumed only to have suffered from what appeared to be organically generated mental health problems. They appeared superficially at least to have completely unfounded allegations to make against the state, government, establishment or whatever forces of action may be present in the UK and I, rather than completely dismiss what they were stating, just escalated the case enquiry to a supervisor. I don’t think there was an aim to reduce the person making these allegations to a point where they felt that we weren’t willing to believe them but I don’t really feel that we did offer any major service on the matters that were likely to limit their lives.
The oddity of the situation, what I think feels very ironic is that I then several years later, is that I too entered a CAB regarding a matter which I think was, to them, wholly attributable to the likelihood that I was suffering with mental health problems. On the other side of the desk, what appears to be the case seems to be that there could be programmes of action against some members of the public that may not be part of the action of some longstanding tradition but because there are no clear links, evidence or motives they appear totally irrational, a reflection of illness. What can happen is that advice services are not strongly geared to do a great deal to assist people in this position and as a result even if there are intention to ensure that each member of the public is treated reasonably there isn’t a great deal that advice services can offer to someone who is in this position.
I may have been slightly honed by the influence of psychology and psychologists. Professionalism within psychology tends to mean not challenging the general assumptions within theory that the psychological professions have generated especially in relation to the notion that society may ‘cause’ some forms of mental illness – mental illness is the disease of the individual. There was always a suggestion from people in psychiatric training and who were linked to clinical psychology that it was not an area to question Policing as this is a professional group that may be called upon with exceptional cases with patients. Whilst this is not the type of matter that is challenged within academic psychology there are routes into this area. There is a journal of political psychology which is concerned more with the impacts upon politics of psychology rather than vice versa – and this is a matter which is regularly discussed by students and patients alike, however, there does not seem to be a strong enough debate on these matters within practitioner journals. Laid on top of that there is not
This and other ‘paranoid’ thoughts are in some ways easy to dismiss, though this can only appear to incriminate the advice service – maybe the politically correct response to someone who, to many may obviously have mental health problems, could be that we don’t have the facility to assist you, and that medical and legal frameworks do not appear to be suitable to address the matters that you’re raising. This of course could lead to greater dissatisfaction with the service that is available. There does seem to be a loophole that for instance the types of antics that go on in the film ‘Changing Lanes’ that could lead to a great deal of paranoia may not be that illegal, certainly not something that the Police would class as criminal harassment, and is not presently legislated against. Providing evidence of this type of action may be difficult to do as well considering the Police as servants of the ruling class actually investigating malpractice within workplaces that may otherwise not be considered as worthy of investigation. Perhaps a few well chosen cases to explore may result in costly delays to a business and result in such a deterrent to other businesses that there could be an incredibly strong counter culture against this type of instance occurring again. Paranoia may be worth reconceptualising from a number of professional perspectives considering the action that a service could take may shape what is or isn’t worth as conceptualising into a definition of paranoia.
It seemed that there weren’t necessarily matters that were related the thoughts of persistent risk and persecution only feeling that people were potentially threats – it consideration of these as being unlinked to data, theory or rationale which normally rings someone’s alarm bells that a person is really and truly mad. There is scope to assess risk and perhaps we have much stronger drives genetically to assess risk collectively and to form a culture to act on this than we acknowledge. When we lose this from our culture we maybe then start to malfunction – what a healthy individual has is access to this form of process and a meaningful link with it. This is evolutionary psychology in a form which is very closely linked to the foundations of the Ottawa Charter for health promotion. There could be very individual forms of risk assessment that are prevalent in our culture which may remain relatively healthy processes such as perceiving all motorists as a potential risk when motorcycling. When past the risk it is generally forgotten about, or at least no longer central in the mind of the rider. For someone with a mental heath problem their general perception of events becomes very unbalanced and recent risk events stay in the mind and are not left behind leaving clear focus. This is going a little Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but there does tend to be a need to continually assess risk more often than not alone. When dealing with the issues that cluster together that may be presented someone with a mental health problem may not able to prioritise, forget about issues which are likely to be fruitless and then deal methodically with those that are worth pursuing. They may also find that they can not interpret what someone is saying when trying to assist them and may continually become difficult to deal with. To a large extent I would imagine advocacy services may be expensive but necessary for people with this condition and I would hope that there would be services made available.
There are other features of the condition which are probably worth indicating but maybe are well covered elsewhere in the sites linked to support for people with mental health problems. I don’t think that I can really sum up much of what the condition has been like other than to state that it’s possible to cover up what feels like a living hell quite easily. I wish to describe the living details of what the mood disorder has been like – I do class people as being very lucky in some respects that they are connected to what is going on in their lives and that they are experiencing moods which are connected to the social events which are going on around them.
The general trend of reducing funding to psychiatric services and increasing police services may shift some responsibility onto Police Forces and PCSOs to deal more effectively with the preventative role they have in dealing with the situation. It becomes increasingly more and more important to consider the role of the Police along with other services in the prevention of mental illness. This may become an area for housing and policing officials to determine a research agenda for if current trends in service provision continue. There will be members of the public coming into advice service centres and stating that they think there are all manner of actions being undertaken against them – a proportion of which may be relatively accurate appraisals of influence which may limit someone’s quality of life. What advice are they likely to receive as part of conventional practice under the guidance of Mr. Brown will remain to be seen.
It was only a very few people that were subject to this type of allegation against the state government or of corruption although I don't know if that was NACABs classification or other reasons including avoiding staff dwelling on the illness state of the client group who were largely local. Having said that I have what appears to be very fractured recall of seeing several staff that I worked with during this period being grabbed and injected which is a little Jacobs Ladder but it’s unusual what I do seem to recall. I don’t know if this is highly creative memory but there does seem to be something that took place I can’t recall. I guess a major difference between being problematically mentally ill and having made a recovery is that I can at least get on with my life despite having unresolved recall of events.
As a final aside I vaguely recall there being some incidents with, I think, the group of grebos from the Cooperage. I assume that one of them was tipped off about some potential corruption and there was a low key attempt to ensure that people were informed about this years before the event – the event being the tsunami in 2004. In about 1993 or 1994, there was an attempt at low key publicity which was carried out, which appeared to be led by one of the grebos. On cardboard signage the terms ‘2004’ and ‘tsunami’ appeared at the bottom of Royal Parade outside petrol station for a couple of days. I don’t know if this was in relation to a computer which was named a ‘tsunami’ which was on the market before the South-East Asian tsunami of boxing day 2004 or not. Just because there was a tsunami in 2004 does not mean that it was linked to a corrupt process and there could have been a large number of predictions made of this nature which don’t appear to have any form of consolidating information to support them. I don’t know if anyone in Stonehouse witnessed this or made a record of what was on these rather odd cardboard signs, however, it would be interesting to find out exactly what was going on....this was the issue I was ignored by CAB staff in Birmingham over and it would be interesting if there were any records in Plymouth of what happened in the early 1990's
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