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VITAL LEGACY
Caroline Blackburn’s obituary (
DDN
,
July, page 10) captures her passion
for service user work. Yet other things
need to be mentioned.
Advocacy and peer-based work are
very much needed today. With
resources increasingly under pressure,
independent advocacy may be seen as
an unaffordable luxury. However,
conflicts frequently occur between
service users and professionals in
addiction treatment. Some remain
unresolved – through impasse, drift,
unnecessarily bureaucratic
pathways/criteria, clinically imposed
decisions, communication breakdown
or lack of confidence among service
users to broach their true feelings
about their treatment.
Such situations will invariably
impact negatively on people’s recovery
and the overall effectiveness of
resources. They only become visible if
managers acknowledge that fallibility
in treatment conversations is not
limited to patients, and invest in
independent ways of capturing,
counting, expressing and making sure
that such issues are present,
supported, and understood as a wider
measure for service improvement.
Some localities did this.
Advocacy is an art. Caroline had
this in bucket-loads and was
respected by service users. Her work
was grounded in service users’ own
experience – while reminding them of
their responsibilities. It is a pity that
in these hard times, this approach is
rarely seen. Perhaps this may not be
because of the case for such work,
but rather, unwillingness in localities
to face up to uncomfortable truths.
Equally though, a lack of capable
leaders of service user organisations
makes life easy for some to portray
everything as rosy.
Caroline was deeply respected.
Those close to her understood that
she helped change numerous lives for
the better. She was a qualified
counsellor, and a committed
advocate. Readers should perhaps
recognise this by critically reflecting
on present provision, and continue
asking ourselves this important
question: Who now independently
engages with individual service users’
views about their treatment, and
advocates for them – regardless of
their treatment goals?
Name and address supplied
RADICAL TALK
A couple of years ago I wrote a blog
article about the strained relationship
between radical politics and drug
dependency. I was reminded of this
blog on reading Alistair Sinclair’s
excellent article ‘Catching the Wave’
(
DDN
, July, page 8).
A bit that I find fascinating is the
line ‘we have been discouraged…
from looking at the mine itself.’
Discouraged by whom, and why?
Sinclair’s article talks with the
passion of a fin de siècle theorist of
how we are ‘staring in to an abyss
and facing the challenges of
modernity’. Radical talk indeed.
Almost revolutionary. How well does
such radicalism sit alongside 12-step
traditions?
While the spaces that the recovery
community creates may themselves be
apolitical, they are unavoidably located
within a wider political context. The
political idealism which has driven
much of what is now labelled
‘recovery’ has very definite views of
canaries and mines and recovery.
Once recovered, a canary should very
much get itself back down the mine,
and become a hard-working canary,
especially if it wants any more millet.
Far from critically looking at the
society that creates the sickness, the
political paymasters are disinterested
in healing a sick society rooted in
inequality. They want the sick well so
that they can go back to being
efficient healthy cogs in the machine,
but with an adjusted mind-set that
allows them to cope with the machine
better, in gratitude and humility.
Extracted from ‘Old waves, new
waves, permanent waves’ on the KFX
drugs blog at www.kfx.org.uk
NO QUICK FIX
Alistair Sinclair makes an interesting
analogy about society’s casualties, as
canaries in the mine, in his article
‘Catching the Wave’. His idea of
looking at the mine itself is bold, even
revolutionary in its ambition. In the
meantime the widely held therapeutic
approach of fixing such casualties and
returning them to productive life
needs to be challenged for other
reasons.
Many, if not most, problem
substance users never had a
productive life to return to. Similarly
this also applies to concepts of
rehabilitation as it implies that such
people were habilitated before their
problems began.
So rather than seeking to return
these damaged people to productive
lives or re-habilitating them, a
different approach is needed. Better
to begin working with the recognition
that they lack important life and
social skills, having never known or
learned them in their young lives. An
assumption that they previously knew
how to manage in our ‘sick nation’ or
were somehow previously productive
is to miss a trick and overlook key
deficits, which are maybe why they
became ‘canaries’ in the first place.
The role of canaries has been
phased out by different and changing
approaches; therapeutic recovery
approaches may need to begin from a
different place.
Andy Ashenhurst, Canterbury
THE WAY FORWARD
As an ex-drug worker I used to
constantly believe in all of this (‘The
Buddhist Way’,
DDN
, July, page 13).
Unfortunately the best I got out of my
agency was to allow yoga once a
week, which in itself was amazing for
the clients but not enough. Let’s hope
this is the true way forward.
Becky
On
The Buddhist way
, July 2014, from
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
GET INVOLVED!
Consultation is now active for
DDN
’s
annual service user conference, with
a steering group meeting taking
place in September. We want your
ideas on the programme and
suggestions for speakers. Never has
true SU involvement been more vital
and we need to make sure the
conference addresses your concerns
and reflects your priorities.
Please visit
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com and
click on the SU conference button
We welcome your letters...
Please email them to the editor, claire@cjwellings.com or post them
to the address on page 3. Letters may be edited for space or clarity
– please limit submissions to 350 words.
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LETTERS
‘Advocacy is an art. Caroline had
this in bucket-loads and was
respected by service users. Her
work was grounded in service users’
own experience – while reminding
them of their responsibilities.’