NEVER underestimate the power of a SINGLE drop of water. Imagine it dripping, drip, drip, drip onto your window ledge. Then AN-OTHER and another, becoming a TRICKLE and a puddle on the floor. Eventually, it turns into a river persistent enough to cut new pathways through the landscape. And when it gets out to the ocean and joins forces into a WAVE, it has enough POWER to affect a SEA CHANGE.
Just a drop in the ocean you say? That drop, along with its neighbours, can erode huge swathes of coastline and tear down rock cliff faces.
This is all a metaphor of course…what I really want to talk about is the COLLECTIVE spirit of the mental health PIONEERS in Manchester, called CHARM.
I was invited to join CHARM when I met Anandi Ramamurthy on a train coming back from Tanya Frank‘s book launch for her debut memoir ‘Zig-Zag Boy‘. I overheard Anandi talking and realised we had been to the same event and the coincidence put me in such a good mood I had the audacity to tell her to read my own book, My Beautiful Psychosis, which ends with the introduction of Open Dialogue into the NHS.
5 years later, with lots of meetings, discussions, visits from people like Rai Waddingham and Val Jackson, as well as money from Safely Held Spaces, Open Dialogue has gradually, but surely, been making its way into my local city of Madchester (mis spelling intended).
CHARM held a public workshop, which interim staff from GMMH attended, after it had been put into Special Measures. (For those of you who don’t know, Greater Manchester Mental Health were the focus of a BBC Panorama, when an undercover filmmaker, posed as a healthcare worker, to expose the hideous and heinous culture of abuse by certain staff at Edenfield Mental Health Unit.)
And from those ashes, the POD Phoenix arose, when a Dutch Open Dialogue Team offered to teach these passionate, angry, broken but not down or out pioneering mental health people of GREATER MANCHESTER in a 3-day workshop.
And all of that is how we came to be screening my latest Green Lane Films documentary ‘Open Dialogue & the ODDESSI Trial’ last week, with Russell Razzaque as keynote speaker and the BRAND NEW CEO Chris Oliver there to see what all the fuss was about. And right next to the old Edenfield hospital site, which triggered much somatically stored trauma in the bodies of those who had had the ‘pleasure’ of either staying or visiting there.
So it’s OFFICIAL – Open Dialogue has FINALLY made its way into my LOCAL city after so much working and waiting round. It’s still going to take time for you to be able to see the full fruition. But I threw down the gauntlet at the screening and challenged Manchester to succeed where London had failed – the big Trustwide transformation.
All of this comes off the back of the fact that the ODDESSI Trial results show that there are significant cost savings to be had. 80% of mental health budget spending goes on only 2% of those in need (i.e. those in hospital). Open Dialogue was demonstrated to lead to more than a 50% reduction in the use of hospital beds. In theory, that cost saving could be put back into training more people in Open Dialogue, as long as those holding the purse strings are not restricted by short term financial planning.
I cannot tell you how moving it is to witness (and be part of), after over 10 years of banging on about it, Open Dialogue finally being introduced into my own LOCAL CITY.
It’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming. Something way more important than football is coming home….KEEP WATCHING THIS SPACE.
