The theme of the third blog, in a series from our Public Involvement coordinator and a member of our Advisory board, is 'post pandemic' and the blog addresses how we will learn from our experiences. World Mental Health Day 2020 is on the 10^th October. Days, weeks, months and awareness thereof have always been a complicated issue for me. On the one hand, without many an awareness ‘day’, ‘week’ or ‘month’ I would not be as educated on topics as I am. 

These awareness dates have catapulted my learning, interest and knowledge in any number of areas but that knowledge has been mine to learn any day of the year and the idea that we focus on a specific topic for a day, week or month makes me nervous that permission is almost granted to forget said topic for the remaining 364 days, 51 weeks or 11 months of the year. I also cynically snort at the irony, often accidentally, presented in the ‘awareness’ calendar. Ever since I discovered Woodland Walking Week was directly followed by Lyme’s Disease Awareness week!

However, World Mental Health Day still feels a good pin in the calendar, particularly now in 2020. Rethink has named their focus this year on World Mental Health Day to “giving a voice to people with lived experience and looking ahead to what they want for a better world, post pandemic”.

Brilliant. I mean “giving a voice to people with lived experience….” is literally in my job description. But here I go with my favourite questions: what does that really mean? How do I do that properly?

• Rule one in my job: Listen.
• Rule two in my job: Listen again.
• Rule three in my job: Make other people hear.

I think we’re getting better at that, I really do. But the next thing is what do we do with what we hear? There is a great interest in patient stories, patient experience, user feedback, which is brilliant but what happens to it? What does it change? Who hears it? Once you have shared it, where does it go and who does it then belong to?

Does it end in a series of slides for a training exercise? Can you imagine sitting in a training session and there is your story, staring back at you “but it’s ok, it’s anonymised”. How would you feel?

I once heard a very challenging story someone was asked to share, and they did share it willingly. And they were well supported and cared for by their staff host.

It shook many in the room, it made everyone think for a bit. I don’t know what was in anyone’s minds in that room at that moment, but I wonder how many people really thought “it’s in my power to change this experience and of others in the future” versus how many thought “how awful”.

I know I thought about both, deeply. I knew it wasn’t in my power to change the service or the experience of the person, but it was and is now in my power to change how that process of story sharing happens. It is in my power to question and challenge: “what will you do with this information, how will you involve this person, how will you share the ‘what’s next?’ Even better, how will you share the power for what’s next with this person and their peers?” It is in my power to reduce the voyeurism that comes with patient stories.

How we work with the people, who provide their experience to us, is also in my control.

What happens to that well of information and experience we draw from, and how do we treat that well? Is it a transaction we pop home from afterwards, keep the well clean and tidy, but if someone else comes along and uses it does it stop being our responsibility to look after? I mean, I am wondering off in a metaphor here, but I hope you get what I mean. And if we’re concerned for the well-being (see what I did there) of the well, its tidiness, its quality of water in this metaphor, how concerned are we about the actual, real life people we’re talking to outside the metaphor?

And as for post pandemic outcomes; I won’t know for sure until I ask, listen and hear. But I do think whoever we are and whatever we do, we need to stop seeing groups of people as one homogenous lump for us to make assumptions about, based on small samples. Particularly where our mental health is concerned. Human responses; resilience; outcomes; conversations; diagnosis and needs are all just that: human, and they are as individual to us as our fingerprints. We have to make sure we never lose sight of that.

For me post pandemic, what do I want?

I want to see all the ground-level action, that mobilised in the early stages, to stay with us. For people to wait less for permission, to do and seek forgiveness if it’s not perfect. I also really, really want to see a lot more for our teenagers. I feel for this generation, more than any other, and the put your phones down (mental health) / pick your phones up (education) revolving door they have been through, needs to be acknowledged and supported. But I want to hear what they feel, see and need before deciding for them.

Most of all, I want to see the walls that came down, staying down. The “how are you” and the “stay well” and all of those things we were hearing, and saying with meaning, need to stay!