Following the human rights violations at Edenfield psychiatric hospital in Manchester, CHARM, (Communities for Holistic Accessible Rights Based Mental Health) decided to collect the stories of people’s experiences in both community and in-patient mental health care in Manchester. The people who have spoken out in our podcasts want to try to bring change to a broken system. Each one are also finding ways to give back to support others.
Do you want to tall your story? Contact CHARM at charm.mental.health@gmail.com
AnneMarie’s Story
Highlights the depth of neglect and the lack of basic compassion in inpatient services, along with a failure to involve and listen to family members where appropriate. No one’s key emotion and memory of a hospital stay should be fear. Mental health facilities should be encouraging individuals to feel safe and everyone should be treated with dignity.
Sarah’s Story
Highlights how patients must have the right to an advocate. These rights should be made known to everyone who is hospitalised due to their mental health. To fail to inform is to deprive people of their human rights, creating stress and deepening mental health crises. Being in a mental health hospital does not mean that your physical health care needs are ignored. A whole person, whole life approach is the only way forward.
Rachel’s Story
Helps us to understand how services have changed so fundamentally from places that offered emotional support in the past to places that seem full of bureaucracy with little engagement between staff and patients. Her experience also highlights the failure of services to adequately attend and safeguard against sexual abuse and the trauma of sexual abuse. Her experience of ECT highlights the dangers of this practice as well as the failure of services to only act with informed consent.
Listen to Rachel’s story
