Speak Your Mind: Voices of recovering service users
"It's a social responsibility to create more public awareness of mental illness. By promoting knowledge of mental illness, fewer people will get sick and more people will recover earlier." ~ Workshop support person
Kai Xin Xing Dong has run a series of Speak Your Mind training workshops to counter stigma and discrimination associated with mental illness. This story is from a workshop support person, who explores why people attend the workshops and what effect the training has on them.
"After attending my first training session as a support person, I realised the workshops had been launched in mainstream society much earlier, and had been very effective. Some Chinese people with experience of mental illness had attended a workshop in 2006, but this new series of workshop focused exclusively on Chinese participants.
Nowadays, there is discrimination towards, and misunderstanding about, mental illness, particularly in the Chinese community. We Chinese people are particularly concerned about our public ‘face'. So service users (patients, consumers, tangata whaiora) are not willing to let people know they have a mental illness.
For this reason I worried that no one would attend the workshop, but I was surprised by the number of participants. In fact, I underestimated people's enthusiasm and courage.
Ten people registered for the workshop, but two were unable to attend due to physical illness. The eight who took part were from a wide age range of people, including a woman in her 70s, with mobility difficulties.
An elderly woman who couldn't attend said to me : "David, I cannot go right now, but if I am better in the afternoon, I will go; if I am still not good, I will go to the next session. By that time, my husband will give me a ride."
I was so surprised to hear that and wondered why they were so enthusiastic about it."
Inspired and enlightened
"I was also inspired by a conversation with another elderly woman. She was a very active person with a bright personality and she was a great public speaker. She had participated in one of the earlier Speak Your Mind workshops.
I asked her why she wanted to participate in the second training, given that she might feel embarrassed to face the public. She replied that she did have some concern about her ‘face', but would prefer to focus on people's attitudes.
She understands some people have negative thoughts about mental illness and people with mental illness. But she believes the more negative you are, the more you will suffer. Instead, if you have a positive attitude towards your illness, you will suffer less, or even not at all!
More importantly, she believes that it's a social responsibility to create more public awareness of mental illness. By promoting knowledge of mental illness, fewer people will get sick and more people will recover earlier.
The reason people so actively participate in this training, I found out, is because they really want to make use of their experience of mental illness to help others think about their own mental health and to stay well."
Excellent workshop format
"With this valuable mission in mind, people worked really hard during the three-day workshop, with the most important content covered in the first two days.
On the first day, the teacher taught us public presentation skills and we were asked to write our personal stories, which are meant to cover: your personal background, opportunities that you might have lost because of your illness, things you want to do in life, support you might have, your personal strengths, and the improvements you believe you have made.
Overall, I found the teaching method very interesting, appropriate and practical. Through this writing, we gained more understanding of ourselves, and learnt how to make our stories more inspiring and educative for others.
The second day saw each of us presenting our stories to the classroom. Afterwards, the teacher affirmed our individual strong points, and other participants gave encouragement and support. We all tried our best to present our stories well, even those who are usually silent completed the task with outstanding performances!
The workshop really helped me with my presentation skills that I can now use to counter discrimination towards mental illness, and I gained more understanding about mental illness and people with experience of mental illness. I could also see other people's enthusiasm for community affairs, goodness, nobleness and strengths.
Speak Your Mind, to me, is the voice of recovering consumers, and the voice of community."
More about the workshops
Speak Your Mind training workshops are funded by the Ministry of Health, and aim to reduce discrimination towards mental illness.
The workshops focus on training people who experience mental illness to present their stories and information to the wider Chinese Community, and enable them to share their experience with mental health workers.
Training is held cooperatively among the Auckland Regional Consumer Network, the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand, and Boai She.
All the participants are members of Boai She.
Bo Ai She
Bo Ai She is a Chinese mental health peer support organisation, which was officially launched in September 2002. It was established by a team of Chinese health professionals, who contiue to offer their support to the organisation. All members of Bo Ai She are mental health consumers of Chinese ethnicity who are either survivors of, or are recovering from, mental health problems.
For more information please contact David, phone: 09 625 1668 or 09 624 3880 or email: chinese.boaishe "at" xtra.co.nz
