On being assessed….an auto-ethnographic account of alienation, 'disorder' and subsequent recovery.

The author of this paper is a multi-award winning mental health nurse and psychotherapist whose innovative and creative approaches to helping psychosis sufferers have won him national and international acclaim. However, the... [ view full abstract ]

The author of this paper is a multi-award winning mental health nurse and psychotherapist whose innovative and creative approaches to helping psychosis sufferers have won him national and international acclaim. However, the author’s first experience of mental health services in his early twenties was not as a professional but as an acutely psychotic patient. The damage and subsequent alienation he experienced and the inspirational figures he was lucky enough to meet ushered in a life-long journey of meaning seeking and of striving to shape health and psychotherapy services into formats which help and work with people rather than categorise, coerce and dismantle. In this paper the author blends reflective insights, autobiographical data and research literature to contextualise his own experiences of being assessed by mental health services, to identify the important lessons these experiences helped him learn and to propose that there are voices we might still benefit from hearing.

Learning Objectives:

Delegates will:

• Learn about lived experience of psychosis and mental health services
• Be introduced to the concept of ‘health dissonance’
• Be offered ideas based on both experiential and research data about how psychotherapy services might be made more accessible and effective