Arts Banned At BSMFT Phoenix Mental Health Day Centre?

By Patient-Guard 

Well thanks for the poetry of the pain we say at Userwatch Collective... Sleeping as we all have been for years...Van Winkle Syndrome though meant we finally woke up alive with long beards to other's concerns.  Thanks to the Birmingham Mental Health (MH) Users who sent the email in of this Art Room poetry at the Erdington Phoenix Day Centre  where apparently for years patients were able to talk freely and now they have to have a staff member present. Wow! That is so retrograde and institutionalized.

We have been sent texts to show there's apparently been: "unsavoury talk" there... Sounds like the main cook at the Birmingham And Solihull Mental Health Trust does not like the smell of the User Kitchen ? ..... The social dog bones they get are obviously a bit smelly lately ... Mind you we have always known the Board of the NHS Trust eat extremely well ... Users at the Phoenix Centre buy biscuits for each other, so they tell us. 

"Arts Banned" - There's Patient Democracy though down the sluice isn't it?  Maybe - but there are other User-networks the Trust does not control as an overarching service with it's eyes on (well paid)  massive monopoly services across Birmingham with it's own in-house User-intelligence squads watching and reporting back.....We know who they are....They do not know all of us watching them...   Of course,  until Patient's get real portable budgets for therapies once out crisis, and not the ridiculous superficial CBT Trust brand marked-up rubbish, which tells everyone thought-control trumps emotional damages, then the Birmingham Solihull Mental Health Foundation Trust will continue with its self beliefs that it's model is fine and recovers people well. We think that is far from the truth over decades of examples and lives and deaths.

Yet the Phoenix Centre for Day Service Recovery for Serious Mental Illness patients,  (SMI's)  happens to be at the centre of a storm brewing over reasonable adjustments being made to old mind-damaged Users who are to be thrust into  new "Work As Recovery"  plans by a team of ex-PCT MH Commissioners who have had their eye on creating a "unified system of mental health recovery right across B'ham" .... Top down 3rd Sector monopoly is what this exercise actually is, with hidden needs to cut costs too. We have seen financial material that supports that assertion and we will follow up in later bloggy "articles".....

These good little ex PCT Commissioners with intellectual whizzyness but a lack of emotional wisdom, are selling some Users down the rivers of sorrows... No model has yet been developed to recover most patients with serious mental illness and the few which do somehow integrate, are favoured either by class connections, London networkers, who influence policy far too much,  or special supports that are graced only to the few ..... 

Many Users remain with family and socially damaged lives from way back and have PTSD like symptoms still ...Even the poor sods labelled Bi-Polar and Psychotic , Schitzophrenic etc.  We know along with others, tens upon tens of stories that never get heard of serious early damaged childhoods.  They never had deep enough empathic psychotherapy either and largely will never get it now  from NHS Trusts. It's like what once patient said to us : "It's slow death by mental health bureaucracy" 

But, we knew, that Patient Pain in Birmingham would surface around the remaining Day Services in being altered in April 2018 with older MH people in them suddenly being told by the renewed ex PCT  new CCG MH Commissioners, still filled with the London Centre For Mental Health ideas (once named Sainsbury Centre For Mental Health) to prepare for work .......

Even though many are ill or so damaged they cannot ever be fit enough...... 

Strange isn't it how an Art Room becomes a shut down User-Voice .... What jerks!  ... How they will shut down User voices Online ? ... Who cares though ? 

Maybe a few  professionals do,  and maybe when they realise the "work driven model" is not the "Treatment Model",  which has long been missing, because of the dominance of an anti emotional over medicalised mental health service, maybe things will alter ...... We will all dead by then probably ....Only bones will be posted here then ... Digital bones ...  

CBT and Work are often just the new social strait jackets which do not show up the mess alienated society has created emerging inside the patient's lives that are crazed at family level by it over generations..... 

Treatment and Choice Of Therapy First Please For Everyone Who Wants It..!

And, do  get the money off the bureau-monster orgs, by getting rid of them and making mental health truly more locally accountable and patient treatment driven. System driven analysis by CCG Mega MH Commissioners perversely creates more of itself rather than individuals being treated with money right there at the front line.  Do we always need bureau-serving classes upon new bureau-classes of health bureaucrats creating their privileged lives off the back of unmet need misery?  Or do we need localised mental health collectives monitored by lay people with some empathic therapy experience of gritted teeth life ,  and not the shiny Cogsters minds that pose as "good practice"...