All Shook Up: What Mental Health Research Means to Me
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/13619322200400009 |
| Published date | 01 March 2004 |
| Pages | 32-40 |
| Date | 01 March 2004 |
| Author | Jenny Seeker |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
All Shook Up: What Mental
Health Research Means to Me
Jenny Secker
Professor of Mental Health
Anglia Polytechnic University
South Essex Partnership Trust
Inaugural Lecture
Inaugural Lecture presented on 24 November 2003
Acknowledgements
My first thanks must go to Dr Patrick Geoghegan at
the South Essex Partnership Trust and to everyone at
Anglia Polytechnic University who was involved in
establishing this joint chair in mental health. For me
there’s no point if my research is of no practical use in
improving people’s lives, so the opportunity to work
both at the university and in the practical world of the
trust suits me down to the ground.
But I don’t think I would have stood any chance at
all of being appointed professor of mental health were
it not for the experience I gained working with my
former colleagues in the Institute for Applied Health
& Social Policy at King’s College London. Together
we completed 18 major studies in six years and
published over 30 peer-reviewed papers from them.
That was the result of the best experience of
teamwork anyone could wish for, between my
colleagues who earned their living as service
development consultants and myself and a great
research team. I could certainly never have done it
alone.
Introduction
What I want to talk about now is what I see as the
most important reasons for doing mental health
research, what mental health research means to me. In
a nutshell, what inspires me and keeps me going is
that really good research can fundamentally challenge
our assumptions about the people we work with. It
can spin us around and make us question some of the
‘certainties’ we have learned, or just absorbed in our
daily work, so that we have no choice but to see the
people we work with, the people who use mental
health services, with new eyes. In short, it can leave us
‘all shook up’.
But it’s no use to anyone if we stay all shook up.
What we need to do is translate new ways of looking at
old certainties into practice, so that we’re not just
seeing people differently, we’re also working with
them in different ways. So this is a talk of two halves.
I’m going to look first at some of the research that has
left me all shook up and then I’m going to consider
the implications for practice.
Research that has shaken my assumptions
The three assumptions I want to look at are, first, that
mental illnesses can be defined and categorised in the
same way as physical illness; second, that people
diagnosed with serious mental illness, particularly
schizophrenia, have little chance of ever recovering;
and, third, that the majority of people who use mental
health services will never be able to work again.
Challenging the categorisation of mental
illness
My interest in this first question of whether we really
can define and categorise mental illness as we can
physical illness stems from my early experiences of
mental health nursing. Like a lot of people, my first
few jobs in mental health were as a nursing assistant
and I found I really enjoyed the work. I found I could
get on well with most of the people I met on the wards
and they seemed to respond to me. But I became
frustrated at my lack of knowledge about mental
illness compared with my qualified colleagues and
decided I would be better placed to help people if I
did my psychiatric nurse training. I took to the first
few months in the school of nursing like a duck to
water. What I loved about it was that it gave me some
32 The Mental Health Review Volume 9 Issue 1 March 2004 ©Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) 2004
J/205/01/04MHR9.1Marchinsides 3/3/04 10:33 am Page 32
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