My name's Steve Gilbert and I now work as an independent consultant, I go by the title
Serious Mental Illness Living Experience Consultant. There's a reason for that title - I have a
diagnosis of bipolar disorder which is characterised by very very deep lows and depressions and
very high, what we call manic episodes.
I didn't know a lot about bipolar disorder but I knew that it had a big impact on people's
lives. I knew that actually this wasn't something that was going to go away. I knew that it
would require medication and that it would require lots of different lifestyle changes.
I didn't really fight the diagnosis, but it was a real change to my life.
Yet over the past - in particular over the past kind of three and a half years I've really
been able to rebuild relationships and actually find out who is a good friend and finding
other people that are like me, that just get it, that I haven't got to pretend. You are
always going to have this as part of your life, but it doesn't have to define you and
everything that happens isn't to do with the bipolar disorder.
One of the things that people used to say to me when I was depressed was "what have
you got to be depressed about you're a good-looking guy and, you know, you've got your whole life
ahead of you, you know, you've got a good job and I don't think people were being malicious
but I don't think they knew what to say and, you know I mean that was nearly 10 years ago
but still today there is a lack of understanding I think about actually what people are going
through and it always feels like people are scared to do something in case they do something
wrong.
My work with mental health charities has really been in this capacity with using my lived
experience and helping them to understand how they best meet the needs of people and,
especially around men and especially around different communitites, for example the African-Caribbean
community. There are some real, a real need to understand why people from the African-Caribbean
community for example and why men are having worse outcomes so really it's about trying
to share my experiences with them and we talk about co-production and co-understanding.
I think in the West Midlands there's quite a lot of work going on to really understand
how we improve the mental health of the region, and Karen was part of the work around the
Mental Health Commission for the West Midlands, and having that curiosity and I think Karen's
kind of got that curiosity, but really to understand individual stories, you know my
life has not just been about statutory mental health services, it's been about a combination
of approaches and really in the work I've done over the past three and a half years
there's been informal peer support so I've been able to meet people that work for different
organisations and form relationships with them and they've kind of shared "oh you know
have you thought about this or did you know about this service."
If we think about mental health and we think about mental health services, I think there's
a perception that mental health is the preserve of statutory services and they have a very
important part to play, but actually a lot of people get the care and support that they
need from voluntary services and not from the statutory services and this is really
important to map what is actually going on, on a national picture first and foremost but
then on a regional level, to understand, well if we were to pick the West Midlands, what
does the voluntary sector look like, what do they provide, what value do they provide
to individuals and what role are they playing, not just in crisis but also in prevention?