It’s taken longer to get stuff on screen through the end of may. We have been busy behind the scenes working with our existing students and preparing for the new students joining us in september. We have just run the last module of this year – working with adolescents as victims and perpetrators. It was great to be able to open this module up to people just seeking focused learning on working with young people. Our continuing professional development students help give us a sense of whether the content of the programme is on the money. We had two practitioners travel down from South Wales because the module content responded to their needs. Here are the dates of our open modules for next year – you can book nearer the time via eventbrite on the Goldsmiths Short Courses webpage
9,10,11 March 2017 – CU71081A Working with adults in the context of domestic violence and sexual abuse
27, 28, 29 April 2017 – CU71082A Working with adolescents as victims and perpetrators of sexual abuse and domestic violence
25, 26, 27 May 2017 – CU71080A Working with children in the context of domestic violence and sexual abuse
There are still very few universities creating this kind of learning community in the violence and abuse field. Our applicants have been saying that they want in depth structured learning AND skills that they can apply to practice. We are hoping that this blog will give more people a way to shape their learning by sharing ideas with us and with other readers. So if you are out in the field wanting to improve your knowledge and skills or share good practice please send us some content. We will consider reviews, viewpoints, reflections, practice and policy related content. We are particularly interested to know about the challenges you face in your work and how you look after yourself. Don’t make it to long – probably up to 1000 words. Be respectful, be inclusive and try to support your arguments with examples from practice, research, books or the media. Don’t shout but do join in!
I was reflecting back over my own awareness of mental health over the years. I still get in a tangle over terminology as I attempt to move myself away from my own implicit biases, the biases my culture feed me and some of the unhelpful aspects of the psychotherapy training I had. It comes down to relationship not labelling – we can help each other when we recognise the need for comfort in distress. But first we have to break out of some tangled ideas.
The first tangle is around the phrase mental health – well we all have that don’t we? Whether our mental health is good or temporarily compromised or a long-term struggle we are talking about the same basic concept when we say mental health. Yet we tend to encounter the term only when someone doesn’t have good mental health. That means that the term ‘mental health’ really means ‘mental illness’. Why are we unable to be straightforward about the difference between wellness and illness?
The second tangle is around the fact that there is no clear division between good and bad mental health. When I started out on my adult life I had any number of problems holding myself together but I never once considered I was attempting to preserve my mental health. I thought mental health was about ‘madness’ and madness was about something genetic or flawed. I had no idea then that I was afraid of my own potential to become mentally ill when I saw distress as something that happened to ‘them’ and not ‘us’. It took a while to realise that there was no us and them. When we dwell in this view of mental illness we do not connect with each other or acknowledge the vulnerability of being human. We avoid relating to each other when fragility rears its head.
The third tangle is that we deny the fact that our mental well being relates closely to social inequalities. I was able to hold myself together because I had some good relationships, some resources and educational opportunities that gave me some social capital. These assets amounted to resilience which in turn shielded me from some of the threats I encountered in everyday life (and everyday sexism). Mary O’Hara wrote about these links in her article for the Guardian following the publication of a report by the World Health Organisation (‘Inequality is bad for your health’ 2009). Interestingly the UK is identified as paticulalry problematic in this regard because of the gap between rich and poor. This quote from the article gives a sense of the mountain we still have to climb to put this imbalance right: ‘The adverse impact of stress is greater in societies where greater inequality exists and where some people feel worse off than others. We will have to face up to the fact that individual and collective mental health and wellbeing will depend on reducing the gap between rich and poor.’
The fourth tangle is in our failure to ask about the experiences that have led someone into a state of mental distress. I work with men and women who have been psychologically, physically and sexually stamped on in their relationships from childhood onwards. What astounds me is that there should be any question about the cause of their mental distress. And yet there is. How many countless people are there wondering around with stigmatising labels stuck over their mouths so that when they speak about abuse we can’t hear them? When I was young, feminism was helping me to challenge terms like ‘hysterical’. Who will help us to challenge terms like ‘Borderline Personality disorder?’
So roll on the untanglers or at least the people who have helped me to untangle my own views. I was lucky to work with Jennie Williams from Inequality Agenda and through her with the National Institute for Mental Health in England before it was disbanded in 2009. Inequality Agenda ran some excellent training on women’s mental health bringing together trainers with academic, work and personal experiences of mental distress. It was through Jennie that I began to unlearn a substantial number of diagnostic categories and their attendent labels. My psychotherapy training had aligned itself fairly comfortably alongside psychiatry which meant that we talked in terms of various ‘conditions’ which in turn had various recommended interventions. Jennie re-introduced me to the importance of relationship and I quickly discovered the most reliable labels: poverty, poor housing, gender, race, abuse history, disability, immigration status etc.
It took Richard Bentall, Suman Fernando, Lucy Johnstone and Peter Kinderman to articulate for me the reasons why diagnosis or the ‘disease model’ was so flawed, so questionable and so uneccessary. They (and others) have demonstrated through work, thought and research that the beneficiaries of the disease model are the drug companies and not the distressed individuals. The categories are imprecise and unscientific as was demonstrated in the Horizon documentary ‘how mad are you?’ (BBC2 2008). The danger with obtaining a diagnosis is that your experience of domestic violence, sexual abuse, neglect, bullying etc could start to be attributed by others to your psychological health. Listen to the Archers and you will see how an abusive partner, Rob Titchener, uses this tangle to undermine his wife Helen’s accounts of his abusiveness.
If inequality is implicated in mental distress then why would any of us accept a diagnostic label? Once you have the label you are marginalised and that marginalisation will add to your distress. So in a week of awareness raising why not watch the documentary and read some of these books. What you will discover is that responding to mental distress is not the sole preserve of the highly skilled – we can all offer comfort and respect to each other at vulnerable moments. I may not be able to cure cancer or deliver a baby but I don’t have to avoid the dying or stay clear of heavily pregnant women.
Williams J, Stephenson D, and Keating F., (2014) A tapestry of oppression. The psychologist June 2014 Vol.27 (pp406-409) Avalaible at : https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-27/edition-6/tapestry-oppression
Bentall, R.P. (2004) Madness explained: Psychosis and human nature. Penguin
Suzanne Martin current programme coordinator writes about the programme now in its second year:
About 10 years back I had been experimenting with different ways of mainstreaming learning on violence and abuse whilst lecturing at the University of Kent. We ran a couple of modules as part of the MA in mental health studies and students gave some very positive feedback. These modules also attracted workers who were struggling to find ways of helping the abused people they encountered in mental health services. So it was clear that although some people wanted to gain a qualification we also had interest from practitioners in search of better interventions. I knew that the time had come for a whole programme of study focused on domestic violence and sexual abuse and I went in search of a university innovative enough to give it a go.
The Department of Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies (STaCS) at Goldsmiths College London welcomed the idea of developing a programme like this. Academics in STaCS had a real commitment to examining problems like domestic violence and sexual abuse in more depth. Most of their courses already included some teaching on these issues, from a range of different perspectives. And all the staff here are excellent on anti-discriminatory practice and explore ways to respond to the various inequalities we see around us in the health and social care field. It was clear that the staff team would be able to come together to help give the programme its strong multi-disciplinary character.
At around the time we started planning the content and getting academic approval the issue of coercive control got added to the UK domestic abuse legislation. We had already decided that it was possible to use the concept of coercive control to link domestic violence and sexual abuse. Coercive control is so characteristic of abusive relating patterns that it made sense to focus on it. Holding that focus demanded that we took a psychological perspective – coercion is after all a behaviour motivated by a powerful psychological need for control. We were also hearing more and more requests from services for ways of identifying and documenting coercive control. There may be legislation that tackles coercive control but proving its occurrence in ways that satisfy a court remains a challenge.
The bringing together of sexual abuse and domestic violence into one programme of study was also an important decision. We felt that the division of these two closely related forms of gendered abuse reflected the needs of services rather than the needs of service users. Given the cross over between types of abuse in intimate relationships many of us felt uneasy with the clear demarcation between sexual and domestic violence. But we think its important to create a space where we can continue to have debates about the pros and cons of dividing the abuse field into separate service areas. This is not the only debate – we also argue about feminism; about gendered perspectives; about wat works and why. We try and critique every viewpoint to see if it offers safety to victims; holds abusers accountable and responds to social inequalities effectively.
What has proved to be so good about the programme is this continued emphasis on having the debates that tend to be uncomfortable or contentious. We built in a strong reflective component to the course along the lines of clinical supervision or staff support. I do alot of team support work in the violence and abuse field so I know how difficult it can be to stay mentally healthy and switched on to peoples needs. Violence and abuse stirs up powerful reactions in all of us and that can create enormous tensions within and between services. We wanted our students to experience group work and learn to reflect on their feelings and behaviour in a safe pace. We also wanted to help grow a work force capable of respectful communication and of valuing differences. I think we have achieved that balance.
