What Users Want From Mental Health Crisis Services
| Published date | 01 March 1996 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/13619322199600005 |
| Pages | 19-21 |
| Date | 01 March 1996 |
| Author | Peter Campbell |
Although the manifestations of mental health
crises have a wide range and may be strongly
contrasted, the basic wants and needs of people in
crises of this kind are probably very similar. I have
regularly asked groups of survivors, groups of mental
health workers and mixed groups to do an exercise,
imagining themselves in a mental health crisis and
then drawing up lists of ‘wants’ and ‘not wants’.
Overall the lists are always very much the same,
although people who have been through services
usually have a sharper idea of what they do not
want. The fact that people in crisis may have
difficulty communicating or talk of worlds, concepts
and perceptions with which mental health workers
have limited natural sympathy, should not lead to
assumptions that the wants and needs are extra-
ordinary or esoteric, or that there is inevitably a
gulf between what people say they want and what
they really need.
On the other hand, individual wants and needs
do conflict and compete. How can you reconcile
someone’s desire for space with someone else’s
desire for a feeling of physical limitation and safety
in the same location and with extreme limitations on
the number and flexibility of staff? It is hard to see
how the traditional acute ward, wherever located,
can possibly provide a sensitive response to crisis
within its contradictory imperatives for supervision
and privacy, containment and renewal, peace and
quiet and restimulation. The widespread demand
for alternative approaches and different destinations
is rooted in personal experience of the barren,
ordered chaos of the acute ward.
What Users Want From
Mental Health Crisis Services
Peter Campbell
SURVIVORS SPEAK OUT
This article outlines some of the
things some/many mental health service
users/survivors want from crisis services.
It is influenced by my own experience of receiving
mental health services over the last 28 years (16
admissions on to acute wards) and by my involve-
ment in the user/survivor movement in the last
ten years. It is also particularly informed by the
following facts: I am a man; I am white; my crises
would usually be described by most experts in
terms of psychotic episodes.
I am not able to address precise definitions of
mental health crisis here, but the reality that a
proportion of those who are deemed to be having
a mental health crisis resist such an attribution must
be openly acknowledged. Numerous recipients of
crisis services are not just unwilling recipients, but
are compelled recipients. Such disagreements have
traditionally been explained through the lack of
insight within the distressed persons, their inability
to know what is really going on and what is in their
best interests. While this approach has been very
convenient in justifying control of unco-operative
people, it is not the most encouraging starting point
for responses sensitive to individual wants and
needs. A more sophisticated appreciation of insight,
and a willingness to address the range of reasons
why people may deny they are in a mental health
crisis, would be most helpful. It is certainly possible
that these denials are not so much because people
do not think they are in difficulty as because they
object to their problems being characterised as
mental illness ones, or dislike the interventions
being offered.
USER PERSPECTIVE
The Mental Health Review 1:1 © Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) 1996 19
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