Presentations from the NHS Health Education Wessex, Wessex AHSN Mental Health Summit

1. Experts By Experience
Becky Aldridge
Chief Executive
Dorset Mental Health Forum
Co-Lead Dorset Wellbeing and
Recovery Partnership

2. Dorset Wellbeing and Recovery Partnership
• Partnership of lived experience expertise alongside
professional expertise.
• WaRP established May 2009, putting people with lived
experience of mental health problems at the heart of service
design, training and delivery.
• Dorset Mental Health Forum – peer run recovery orientated
organisation, local employer, strategic partner, advocacy,
consultation, representation.
• Development of local lived experience infrastructure,
opportunity to reframe experiences, peer mentoring.

3. Defining Recovery …..
“Probably the most useful way of understanding recovery is linking it to
our own experience because it is something that is common to all of us;
it is not specific to mental health problems.
Any of us, who have been through a divorce, being made unemployed,
a major illness or bereavement, know that that changes us; there is no
way to going back to how we were before that event.
We have to incorporate that into our way of living and we learn from
that and move on with that, which is exactly what we are talking about
in terms of recovery from mental health problems…….

4. …….. Recovery is about taking back control over your own life
and your own problems, about not seeing your problems as
being uncontrollable, or that their control is just the province of
experts.
It is about understanding yourself what is possible and what you
can do to help yourself.”
By Dr Repper from An independent investigation into the
care and treatment of Daniel Gonzales (January 2009) p. 124.

5. Five Year Forward View for Mental Health
Call for:
 Right help, right time, right way.
 Reduction of stigma; mentally healthy communities
 Empowering people experiencing mental health problems.
 Equal status of mental health and physical health.
“If I’d had the help in my teens that I finally got in my thirties, I
wouldn’t have lost my twenties.”
= Accept emotional distress as part of being human?

6. Our Journey Together ……
 Establishing buy-in to Wellbeing and Personal Recovery principles
as concepts. Building the Recovery contagion. Understanding the
principles of Coproduction.
Scale and nature of the task for the organisation.
 Demonstrating the value and inspiration of lived experience
expertise and the successful development of partnership working.
Dominance of clinical recovery. Power struggles.
 The introduction of Peer Specialists and Recovery Education Centre.
Change at the periphery but not at the core?
 Parallel process of recovery journeys of individuals, teams and
organisations. Engaging commissioners.

8. Co-Production
“ Co-production means delivering public services in an
equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals,
people using services, their families and their neighbours.
Where activities are co-produced in this way, both services
and neighbourhoods become far more effective agents of
change.”
(Boyle and Harris, 2010)

9. Why are Peer workers important?
“People in recovery know three very important things:
1. The ways in which mental health systems currently help people.
2. Ways in which mental health systems currently fail and harm
people.
3. Ways in which mental health systems could be better at educating,
engaging and supporting people and their loved ones in their own
recovery journeys
If we can invite, value and benefit from their accumulated wisdom,
ideas and energy, we might be able to create together a system that is
more accessible, respectful and responsive to all those in need.”
Peer Support in Mental Health: Exploitive, Transformative, or Both?
Larry Davidson, Sept 2014

10.  Peer workers introduced with range of reassurances.
 Support mechanisms, supervision, capacity.
 Being a critical friend ……
 Challenging practice / language / perception.
 Celebrating good practice, making staff feel valued.
 Peer workers act as a bridge between staff and people
who access services …. more difficult if peers are staff.
Peer Workers in Services

11. .
The Importance of Recovery Education

12. “We can’t solve
problems with the same
thinking that created
them..”
Einstein

13. Thank You …
Further information:
www.dorsetmentalhealthforum.org.uk
beckyaldridge@dorsetmentalhealthforum.org.uk