The fantastic Angela talking about how recovery is contagious, meditation, non-existent biscuits and lots of exciting projects in her new role as Advanced Lived Experience Educator. This is the sixth episode of Peers in a Pod- the podcast all about Peer Support work. Who are we? what do we really DO ? how did we get here? In Season 1 Peer Trainer Fiona Eastmond interviews peer workers from across the NHS to find out what makes them tick. Sporadic releases.
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The fantastic Angela talking about how recovery is contagious, meditation, non-existent biscuits and lots of exciting projects in her new role as Advanced Lived Experience Educator. This is the sixth episode of Peers in a Pod- the podcast all about Peer Support work. Who are we? what do we really DO ? how did we get here? In Season 1 Peer Trainer Fiona Eastmond interviews peer workers from across the NHS to find out what makes them tick. Sporadic releases.
Patreon (donate £1 a month)
Ko-Fi (donate any one-off amount)
Twitter (@PeersinaPod)
Twitter (@FionaThePSW)
Hi, my name is Fiona Eastmond and this is"peers in a pod." All about peer support working. Who are we? What do we do? Most importantly, what are our favorite biscuits? I am utterly privileged today to be joined by Angela would you like to introduce yourself?
Angela:My name is Angela Kinn and I am today's peer in the pod.
Fiona:So we've got some lovely questions here, the very first question is what is peer support?
Angela:Peer support to me is something you and I are doing right now. It's something that has made a huge impact on my life. Although it comes in many forms. So when I first came across peer support, it wasn't called that. Then it isn't necessarily called that, but it is simply where you have common experiences you are helping other or in groups, usually to recover your life, to recover. From your mental health difficulties. And it's a powerful thing. In terms of my job role, that's when it becomes professionalized and within mental health services, but there's lots of peer support that exists outside of that context. And that's just as important.
Fiona:Yeah, there are so many definitions of peer support. I just remember constantly being asked, is why I've made it. The first question because it was something I used to get asked pretty much daily.
Angela:well, strange you see because I would say without any overstatements, that peer support in it's broadest sense. Saved my life. And I often tell this story, but it's a true story. Which is that when I was really seriously unwell and in, in the middle of the psychiatric system with all that goes with that with lots of, Going in and out of hospital. When actually, I had multiple problems by that point, I had bipolar, I had addiction problems. I was in a highly abusive relationship. Yeah. I was very much trapped in very serious trouble actually. I had lots of firm mental health professionals who told me I could recover. But. I didn't believe them. The reason I didn't believe them is, I didn't know anybody who had any kind of recovery from the kind of difficulties I had. All of the people around me were not recovering. Basically. They either had very serious addiction problems, very serious mental health problems or both. And they weren't recovering. They were. Struggling as much as I was. So of course I didn't believe it was possible to recover, cause it, it looked like a theoretical possibility what the clinical people were saying to me. So it wasn't until I started to meet people who actually were recovering that I began to be hopeful that actually recovery was possible I did have to stop drinking and I did have to get rid of this awful bloke I've referenced. Yeah.
Fiona:well done.
Angela:yeah, and that they had to go that there to go at the same time, by the way, the bloke and the booze had to go at the same time. But I actually wouldn't have been able to do that. Unless I believed that it was possible to completely change my life. And that became believable when I met people who were recovering. So a few years after that, I started to think mental health services need us because where I met these peers was not within mental health services, At all It was some kind of self-help outfit. Yeah. Which is hit and miss that you would find it when you're in the middle of mental health services, very Hit n miss and I thought you need peer support workers, peer people to go inside mental health services and reach in. Yeah. And without that, we really are making a serious mistake, recovery comes out of belief, the belief that you can. Yeah. And you've got to create environments in which that belief is possible, I do have some kind of, difficult kind of analysis, as some of these realities is that I do actually believe that people who were unwell in the way I was unwell. Can actually be a very bad influence on each other. Yeah.
Fiona:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Angela:actually what amazes me is that mental health services are aware of this. They are aware of people being a bad influence on each other. They are less aware that they need to counteract that by people being a good influence on each other. There are some very dangerous peer environments. Peer cultures that surround mental health services. And I don't actually believe that mental health services understand the full extent of how damaging those cultures are and why you need a peer workforce to counteract that.
Fiona:Not to mediate, but to be able to show, professionals what's going on almost to translate to, open a door. Lots of professionals having met me were quite surprised that I'd had a clinical diagnosis and after they'd worked with me for a couple of weeks, they weren't that surprised, they also were really joyful to meet somebody who'd recovered because they'd been telling people all their lives, it was possible to recover and had barely ever met any of their patients or, five or six years down the line or 23 years down the line who'd actually recovered. So they assumed it was rare, but it's not as rare as you might think.
Angela:I think there's something here that we need to talk about and have the conversation with mental health services, about how necessary it is for. Us to build a peer workforce for us to broaden the understandings of recovery and it's necessary for, the mental health professionals at work in mental health services as well. Because what you get is a sort of repeating cycle of low expectation because you only ever see the people who don't recover cause they keep coming back and going round and round in circles. In the services and recovery is something that sort of disappears in a way it disappears if you're someone who uses the service, because people disappear from the circuit of mental health services and you think where have they gone? Yeah. And when I was in that. Really difficult circuit of mental health services. I used to assume people had taken their own lives. That's why they disappeared. And sometimes that had happened, but also actually people had started to recover. And when I started to recover, I met some of them who people I had assumed had taken their own lives. And I just think. That's, that must happen to people who work in the services as well. Where they think, what's happened to that person. They never get to see the recovery. I think there's a really fundamental problem that mental health services don't understand recovery. Because and this isn't wrong. But it's too limited. It's not wrong, but it's too limited. Yeah. Is that their job is to treat illness clinically. And that's not wrong, but it's too narrow that's the issue. And I often have this really basic thing, which is if you don't know what recovery looks like, how do you know what you're heading for? If recovery is simply. Not illness in the clinical view of services. How do you know what you're heading for? if you don't actually know much about it.
Fiona:That's a good point. Do you know that brings us so beautifully and perfectly to the next question, which is what is recovery anyway,
Angela:what is it? bloody hard work, but
Fiona:Yeah.
Angela:not. It's not as hard work as, how I was before. Yeah. So
Fiona:Yeah.
Angela:recovery to me is bigger than about illness. So if I'm to be frank, I think some of it is actually about illness. It is about. Having a mental health condition and having features of other mental health difficulties and how, I personally can recover and control those difficulties and their complexities. And that's ongoing for me. That's still an ongoing issue. I still struggle with my mental health. And people do. I've noticed, I've been around recovering people for a long time and I'm aware that people struggle with their condition still to varying degrees. Yeah. So there's a part of it. That's more about condition and more about those difficulties, but there's another more valuable part in some ways, which is about life. So it is about Living the life that you want to live, even if there are some limits imposed by living with conditions. Yeah. And one of the things I did have a very recovery focused psychiatrist at one point she was lovely. I remember her really well, She was well into her seventies and still practicing. So recovery is not new when I was really unwell, she said to me, do you know? I think it was, I was starting to recover. It was very early stages of recovery and she said, Angela, you need to stop thinking about how much your mental illness has wrecked your life and start realizing that your life is making you ill. And it was, I had to change my life. In order to get well, I had to stop accepting the things that I was accepting. I was accepting abuse. I was accepting that I couldn't be awake and not drinking because everything was too painful. I had to get rid of those realities. I had to do something very different with my life in order to recover clinically. Do you see I had to say to myself, I want a decent life. Yeah. And then the recovery from the difficulties in the condition, followed that actually. And I think that's right. Yeah. That is part of what we talk about when we talk about recovery is that people's lives come first. Yeah. It is about building a life, which is as meaningful and as a high quality, as it can be. Yeah.
Fiona:as unique as well.
Angela:Yeah. And it's self-defined, there are some tough issues in it though. There are some really tough issues. There are people I know, or I come across who have really severe problems. Where I do ask myself, where is the quality of life? And I ask myself, What are we collectively doing in mental health services to help this person? I'm thinking about people who are labeled as chronic, usually with really severe psychosis and, peer support workers and peer trainers and all of us in the recovery movement, we're not naive about those realities and those massive challenges, and we're also, I think in terms of recovery, we're not, we know it's not simple, the peer support workforce and the Recovery College and all of those features of Recovery Services we know we don't just come in. Sprinkle some peer pixie-dust and it's all going to be right in the world. Yeah. We know that. Yeah. What we're doing is we're building new professions. The aim of those professions is to sit alongside, allied health professionals and doctors and nurses is to sit alongside. And be involved in a multidisciplinary way yeah. But our passion and our belief is that we can make a significant difference to mental health services. But that doesn't mean that everybody's going to recover. It doesn't mean that there isn't going to be really big challenges. I've wanted to do this before these roles existed. Right at the beginning of my recovery journey, which is about 15 years ago I thought people with mental health difficulties, like mine should be working in mental health services. I didn't know Rachel Perkins was doing this and that, in Southwest London. And I didn't know about any of that at that stage. I was just going into my early recovery phase. I didn't really know. I just thought it's really obvious that we know stuff. I don't know quite how we would use what we knew, what we know, but I had this really deep, passionate belief that I know that we can make a difference. but it took me a while to find you guys. At first I was just thinking that on my own. And wondering if a job might arise at some point in the future.
Fiona:I remember being told about these new roles and thinking. gosh, I could do that. I was thinking I want to do something that, that means something and I wanted so much to help people. I think I have And it's been the most incredible learning curve and the hardest job I've ever done, but it's the only satisfying job I've ever done, I have to be doing lots, to be very busy or I get unhappy which is either some kind of clinical diagnosis or just who I am and who knows. I think there were still lots of people out there who should be working in mental health services and aren't yet I feel like more roles need to be made available. So many roles have been made available very recently. I just mean that it needs to continue. the next question is what is your most often used recovery tool? mindfulness
Angela:Mindfulness, definitely I don't think it's a panacea for people. Lots of people don't get on with mindfulness, but for me, it's definitely the one that I adopted very early on and that I've worked. Actually, there's two tools. The other one is I go to self-help groups and I'd say that they both work in tandem, they're my go tos. But the mindfulness is easier to talk about. I have to deal with my internal reality in some way, even now, things can be very challenging and I can have thoughts that kind of drop emotional bombs on me, it's, really. I still experience a lot of fear which I know to be trauma related, but I'm still trying to make progress on it. You don't ever learn how to do mindfulness completely. You just have to keep doing it. And I just keep doing it. And I don't think that I would have fared very well without Mindfulness. If I'm frank, I think I may have even started drinking again because I had to find a way of. developing a sense of calm within myself that wasn't, harmful and I had to work at it quite hard, but it's yeah, it's, it does enrich my life. I might be joining a band of Buddhist monks based in south London. When the pandemic kind of. I'm not sure about being a Buddhist monk. I'm thinking I'm the wrong gender for that but I've been invited by a group of monks to join them
Fiona:Would did you have to shave your head?
Angela:I do hope not. No, I don't think so because the guy that's invited me has got hair.
Fiona:Excellent. how did you get into your current role and what is it
Angela:I can't remember when I went into my newest role, my new role is Advanced Lived Experience Educator at the Recovery and Wellbeing College. So I've always worked in the Recovery and Wellbeing College, for about nine, ten, years now, but I was a Senior Peer Trainer there, and now I've gone up a bit. I was promoted at some stage during the pandemic. So leadership is part of it. So leadership of the peer side of the recovery college, my work's a bit more complicated is what it means. I'm responsible for more so implicit within it is making sure that we do good training and supervision. Also really thinking with the other advanced lived experience practitioners and senior peer support workers. So I'm making links with peer support and with the employment services going forward. Also responsibility for project management. So I've got projects to manage now. Research is part of it. I'm going to be doing a research project on digital inclusion. It's piece of action research. We're testing a new peer role, actually, which is a Peer IT Trainer. We're going to see if we can extend our peer principles into Peer IT Training, and whether this works as an intervention for people who are profoundly, digitally excluded people with psychosis. So that's one project. And then the other project is a compassion project in Grenfell. And that is partly a training project and partly a coproduction project. But I get the privilege, of managing projects now, and putting a lot of work in to ensure that, as far as possible that they're successful. The two that are going that, they're very likely to be successful.
Fiona:Good. Good. You do a lot, So here's a tricky one. Describe your typical working day using only five words that's Okay.
Angela:funny. Scary. I've got three. Hang on. Emotional no moving, not emotional, moving and proud.
Fiona:That's lovely. I like that funny is in there. I love that so this is the big question. Really. And then there's kind of two short biscuity questions. What are you most proud of in your work? One amazing story
Angela:I'm proud. My most recent proud is the Grenfell project. On the first day, everybody turned up.
Fiona:Wow. Did you have? Loads of people booked in?
Angela:Everybody except one person. And that was simply an oversight. Meaning that everything had come together in terms of galvanizing it all. So a lot of work gone into that sort of launching it. Yeah. We've got to see where it goes and there's all sorts of Things going on there but we've got to the first sort of marker of it and all the sort of work in the background I'm proud that it's launched now and we're in motion with it. What else? I think where I meet people usually later, where I've had an impact on them. And I haven't known necessarily very often for this kind of work, you don't know really at the time, because you meet them later on in their story. And they tell you, That I'm really proud of. I'm also proud of the knock-on effects of the job in my life because I do learn about recovery and other places, but recovery is contagious. Yeah. You catch it from people. And my family has got better mental health now. And I think that's because I'm constantly, I've gone off a bit from what I'm really proud of, but it's like what the job gives to me as well. It gives a lot to me that I then share, In my family and personal networks and recovery is contagious. I have family members who are weller than they were before, because they picked up from things that I'm doing, and then they've done their own work. And, it does, it is contagious.
Fiona:There's nothing quite like walking the walk, it's that old quote, be the change that you want to see That's where it becomes contagious. I think people see you doing, and then they think, oh, it might be worth me doing that.
Angela:I talk about it a lot.
Fiona:Yeah.
Angela:and people learn, I mean, I'm proud of the college Good And I'm proud of the people I work with. I'm proud of it or proud of them. I feel as if my role at the moment is to be less proud of my training because training, isn't a big part of my job now. Yeah. My job is to support others. And lead others. I'm also and it's with my new job. It's a bit hard to establish straight away because I think I do want to go into a research direction and I've got to, I don't know whether that will work out for me, but I've got a feeling lived experience research is where I want to go next.
Fiona:That makes a lot of sense. I can definitely see and want to read a paper written by you.
Angela:yeah, it's not so much about publishing it's about I think we need a very, we need a stronger evidence base for what we're doing.
Fiona:We really do.
Angela:Could I take sideswipe? at psychiatry here?. Yeah, because I'm doing a presentation tomorrow, which has got me reading around the history of mental health services quite a bit reading our articles about that. And one of the things that I've noticed, is that everything has been a fight. So long. Yeah. So we think we're having to fight a lot as peer workers. Now, if you look at the history of it, the even psychiatry sort of progressive elements of psychiatry have had to fight for the most basic things, against. What I see as a tide of discriminatory belief, actually. The closure of the asylums started in 19, 1950s, and didn't really finish until the 1980s. It took all that time. And you think why did it take all that time? Because people didn't want people out of the asylums. Yeah. And there's been repeated failure to, you know, invest in community mental health services. And then later on you could only invest in community mental health services, if it was being justified, that it was because people were dangerous so that, like New Labour had this big obsession with, they did increase the funding and mental health services, but most of it was funneled to forensic. And then even things like, IAPT it had to be justified in terms of this is causing unemployment problems. So basically mental health expenditure really has to be justified about it harming society. Yeah. And it's not until. Extremely recently, is it seen as meritable in its own terms? What does that say about society's attitude to people with mental health problems? It's saying you don't count. Yeah. And what we've had is a recent shift in this, but I'm skeptical about how deep that shift really is or whether it's, there's a superficiality to it. That it's just about people talking about their emotions. It really isn't, gonna touch the sides in terms of more severe mental health difficulties. That's to be sure. But anyway, it's just this feeling when you read the history of things that everything has been such a fight. Yeah. So I think that's useful for the peer workforce, actually to know that this is a characteristic of change. In and around mental health services. Yeah, but the side, so I put psychiatry is I think we're under pressure to develop an evidence base psychiatry carried on without one, for many years and did
Fiona:do you think that's why we're allowed to carry on without one
Angela:well, but we didn't cut bits of people's brains out you know,
Fiona:No. Why don't we just, we don't have the time, you know, Or the knives.,
Angela:as a peer workforce. My serious point is we need to be allowed time to develop. As a workforce to develop as a profession and to develop an evidence base and not right. If you don't get your evidence base right up right quickly. And also you can't develop an evidence basis unless you've got a working workforce. Yeah. One of the things that compromises an evidence base is that if your peers are being co-opted into ordinary support roles, Because of the cultures of mental health services, then how can you test whether peer support is working? You can't because it's not working as it should. I suppose my request to the mental health world out there is give us the space and the time and the resources to do this properly. And we will.
Fiona:Well, I have no doubt. especially with you as one of our leaders that things will get done and they'll be done well and considerately and with a lot of thought, given to the breadth and depth of the subject. And the difficulties as well, the barriers and all those different things, because I find that when you think about something, you think about it as a whole object, it's like you think in 3d. And that I think is absolutely essential for a researcher and also for a manager, so yeah. Question seven is your favorite listening when you need a boost.
Angela:I'm not sure about a boost, but I am very much into Captain Beefheart and his magic band.
Fiona:Brilliant. you pick one song?
Angela:Yes. I am a little bit that some of his music, I love it, but it's a bit un-listenable. Yeah. Yeah like"Trout Mask Replica" and all that, but there is one album called"Clear Spot", which is much more listenable and there's a track on that called"Her eyes are a blue million miles".
Fiona:That sounds brilliant.
Angela:A really beautiful track.
Fiona:Thank you. I'll put it in.
Angela:Yeah. Put that one in.
Fiona:So finally last but not least, and without wishing to trivialize very serious conversations. I think it's always absolutely essential when you're getting to know somebody to find out what their favorite biscuit is, what is your favorite biscuit? And why,
Angela:Do you know what? There's a bit of a problem. With my biscuit thing, because my very favorite biscuits no longer exist.
Fiona:what were they?,
Angela:when I was a kid, there was these incredible iced biscuits. They used to have pictures of Cowboys on princesses. They were in all different wild colors of the rainbow. And they were quite thick actually, but the biscuits that equate to them now in the modern biscuit world are sports biscuits, the ones that are circular and they're all different colors, those iced biscuits, and they're all different colors and they've got the wavy lines along them that is their modern equivalent, but the ones in the seventies they are retro biscuits that no longer exist. Nobody's revived them. And I don't even know who made them. They're definitely real. I haven't constructed a false biscuit memory.
Fiona:Fantasy biscuits. No, they sound familiar. Something about Cowboys and princesses on icing on biscuits
Angela:like sports biscuits, except they were solid with no hole. They were thicker on their base I used to get so excited by those biscuits.
Fiona:fantastic.
Angela:In a way that a child, is much more biscuit centered normally than an adult. There's a whole world of biscuits for a child. Yeah. So I suppose modern biscuit wise don't ever buy me a pack of they're not called sports biscuits. That was the second manifestation. They used to be a picture of sport on the back they're circular.
Fiona:Party
Angela:They're party rings. Now there was sports biscuits in the eighties. Yeah. They've gone through several manifestations. The type of biscuits that I'm talking about.
Fiona:so was the icing crispy and hard, but thicker. Yeah. So I can't ever buy you a packet of party rings because they're just made of disappointment.
Angela:If you buy me a packet of party rings, I'll eat all of them within a day, which is why I'm asking you not to buy me them.
Fiona:So what do you think? How was it? Was it as torturous as you expected? Or was it quite good?
Angela:it's quite
Fiona:good.
Angela:I really enjoyed it.
Fiona:I'm going to let you get on with the rest of your evening. Thank you so much for being with me. It was an absolute pleasure.
Angela:Oh, yeah, I've had fun. Thank you. Purplefiona.
Fiona:Thank you, Angela.
Fiona 2:Don't forget to follow me on at Fiona The P S W on Twitter. Upcoming episodes include all sorts of very interesting people. And i very much look forward to Having you as my listener again thank you