LIVED EXPERIENCE
even at night-time. It was thus sometimes quite hard to sleep, and they’d be there even when you went outside. At times I had to experience this day after day.”
Being judged?
Although she appreciates why she was placed under such supervision, with staff
sometimes ‘nervous’ to take her off it; she tended to end up thus supervised for considerable time. She added: “Again, that is just imposing an extra layer of confinement. It’s tricky, because you’re struggling with levels of danger that are potentially damaging to yourself, which necessitates some protective practices that will inevitably frustrate you. However, I quite often felt I was just sat and being judged, rather than interacted with. Some of the staff did engage, and many would understand when I didn’t want to talk, but some would just be sitting there on their mobile phones.”
Co-production in the design and delivery of mental healthcare was the theme at an evening event held in June 2018 at London’s The Dragon Café in Borough. Katharine Lazenby is pictured second from left, with (left to right) DiMHN President, Joe Forster, Professor of Democratic Mental Health at the University of Central Lancashire, Mick McKeown, staff nurse, Sarah Loughran, and The Dragon Café’s Declan McGill, who is also Mental Fight Club’s Programme manager.
I asked if she thought staff gave sufficient thought to service-users as individuals. She said: “I don’t think those things are really
considered...you’re just a
patient. Staff do, however, see differences in different people. I wonder, though, whether the differences they perceive come down to your diagnosis, and how long you’ve been unwell. There’d be a real sense, on a service-user’s first admission, of
wanting to ensure they would not relapse. I really felt that energy. Sometimes there was a feeling that staff were simply trying to get you in and out. Overall, though, they did their best to support individuals to grow in the way they needed to, and to stay in touch with their passions. For instance, I was given leave to attend university for my arts degree while at the north London hospital, which was enormously important. They would, however, only give me day leave until I reached a certain treatment point. Barriers and freedom were constantly negotiated. The leave you got was reviewed on the ward round, and determined by how well you were coping at the time”.
Self-discharging
I wondered whether, in her first year in inpatient care, Katharine Lazenby could, at any stage, have decided she had ‘had
enough’, and discharged herself? She replied: “If you want to self-discharge, the staff decide whether they think you are well enough. Even if they are reluctant, if there aren’t grounds to keep you, they will let you self-discharge. However, if they
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.com THE NETWORK | JANUARY 2020 13
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