Recovery and all that jazz

Hi to everyone who reads my blog, those of you who came to our recovery champions courses in the last few months, will know my passion is jazz singing and that Ron had bought me for Christmas a 5 day jazz singing course in the south of France. Well I finally did it a couple of weeks ago & it was amazing, in fact the way the week was set up it felt like I was a participant on a recovery champions course! But my singing improved & I met some wonderful muscians.

Over the summer Ron & I have spent time at home & actually had a proper holiday in France with the kids. We have also had 4 litters of piglets, the latest are only 4 weeks old. We bought some quails & these have become Ron’s pet project.

As for work we have concentrated on new products, with several new DVD’s, from Eleanor Langdon, Dirk Corstens, intervoice conference and our first joint Italian/English DVD of a hearing voices conference.

Ron’s new edition of Recovery An Alien Concept was just launched last week. It doesn’t seem like 12 years ago when we lived in Gloucester & Ron would write deep into the night on the first edition. 

This time he asked Eleanor Langdon to edit it for him & she has done a great job, for all of those academics out there who encouraged Ron to get the book edited & indexed properly a big thank you, with particular thanks to Marius for his comments and Eleanors excellent job. The book looks beautiful with its stunning new cover designed by Evelyn from the puffin room http://www.thepuffinroom.co.uk/. She designs all our DVD covers and has been great to work with.

It has also been very professionally copy edited & type set by Sharon & David  from Two Raven press who also live on our island in Uig they have been a great find

http://www.tworavenspress.com/. Take a look at their books. I can really recommend Sharon’s own book - The long delirious burning blue. A beautiful intense moving book that kept me riveted from cover to cover.

Finally Ron & I are moving into a house further into Ness facing north looking right out to sea, that we will actually all fit in to.

We are hoping to use our croft cottage for some interesting recovery work in the future & for holiday lets.

This autumn Ron will be very busy with a tour of North America. I will be knee deep in mud with the pigs & moving slowly into our new house.

We will have further new DVD’s coming out one by Marius Romme & One by Sandra Escher & a fabulous new workbook in the victim to victor series for male survivors of sexual abuse called reclaiming our lives written by Jim Campbell & Ron Coleman.

I am writing this from a hotel in Manchester.

We have just had a very successful 2 days of workshops in Glasgow & Manchester with Oryx Cohen & Will Hall from the USA. They were wonderful presenters and really made me think more about how we connect to our communities and start change there rather than trying to change the mental health system, we hope to invite them back again next year.

I’m waiting for my flight to Australia where I am working in Perth for one week, my body clock will be very confused by next weekend and my return to Lewis. Ron has unfortunately been taken into hospital for a couple of days to sort out his diabetes. I must admit it’s a little nerve wracking leaving him and the family but he assures me he is alright. 

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Ron Coleman and Karen Taylor have an international reputation as speakers and authors. They are the directors of ‘Working to Recovery Limited’ an innovative international consultancy, training and publishing company with a cutting edge approach to supporting and improving mental health provision.

Working to recovery is a passion & its our life

Working to recovery as those of you that know Ron & I is more than just a business, it’s a passion & its our life. I think both of us are totally driven to changing the way mental health care is delivered.

This is a little like a poisoned chalice though. I have been away from my kids, my home & my animals & vegetable garden for 3 months Ron when he returns in 3 weeks will have been away the same. Every week away was an amazing experience with lots of people energised & revigorated by our visits.

But I wonder sometimes at what price to our family. Yes all our kids are resilient, confident with people, adaptable to changing carers, but as adolescents will they haunt us with taunts about us not caring enough for them. Being more there for other people rather than them. Is this the price to pay when you find yourself on a spiritual journey, a quest, a destiny.

I know Ron sometimes talks about loosing the priest hood & Christianity but finding a new religion in recovery. My own journey has led me through my fascination with spirals to finding a connection with the celtic crone, goddess of healing, death and the journey of renewal.

All of us need to make meaning of our lives, who is to say that I’m psychotic, eccentric, new age or just a human being who wants to make a difference.  What I do know though is that passion is vital. This is true for every recovery worker. They must have a passionate believe that recovery can happen and that by walking alongside somebody on their journey they can keep hope alive even in darker moments

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Ron Coleman and Karen Taylor have an international reputation as speakers and authors. They are the directors of ‘Working to Recovery Limited’ an innovative international consultancy, training and publishing company with a cutting edge approach to supporting and improving mental health provision.

The future looks very bright

I have now been in Australia for almost 9 weeks. It is definitely becoming a place we know almost as well as the UK. In fact talking to locals we realize we have travelled more extensively around Australia than most Australians. That is also true for us back in the UK , there are not many towns in the UK that either Ron or I haven’t been.


This has given us a fantastic opportunity to network, develop our idea’s on recovery, see how different places are taking forward recovery and unfortunately watch the same mistakes being made as each country strives to take services forward. Some parts of Australian mental health services do not look dissimilar to things that were happening in England 20 years ago. You could also argue the same in some parts of Scotland.

Where psychiatrists hold a substantial part of the power it seems to have been a lot harder to move towards a recovery vision of services. Beds seem to be a power base, as do the number of clients you have on your caseload. The systems tend to be more hierarchical with top down decision making, of course there are exceptions to this rule. In Australia poly pharmacy is regularly practiced & surprisingly instead of drug of last resort, Clozapine is very often given to very young people with only one episode of psychosis.

There are exceptions to the rule, Trieste manages with very few beds & have very developed community services & these developments have been implemented by psychiatrists. In Bethlehem hospital a Croatian psychiatrist Ivona along with the nursing staff are taking recovery forward. In West Cork Dr Pat Braken leads the way. In South London & Maudsley & St Georges an excellent paper has just been published “Recovery is for all-Hope, Agency and opportunity in psychiatry, a position paper by consultant psychiatrists. Dr Richard Warner from Bolder Colerado USA is also vey recovery focused.

What you do find though, is that where the state services are still lagging the voluntary sector is very forward thinking. Here in WA Joe Calleja & his staff at Richmond fellowship have led the way in both backing recovery & funding the Australian hearing voices network.

In Tasmania Anglicare, Aspire, Mission Australia, GROW & RFTAS are developing the recovery agenda with other N.G.O organisations. Although to be fair on the state services they have been heavily investing in training for all staff in taking recovery forward led by many enthusiastic professionals including Ellen Cross from their workforce development unit.

In Scotland SAMH took this role for many years though sadly this no longer seems the case.

England has a strong voluntary sector, Rethink being one of the leaders, St Mungo’s is another example as a homeless charity that has embraced the principles of recovery.

I think the future looks very bright I do not believe that recovery can be buried as another fad, more and more people are seeing the connectedness between trauma & mental distress, my dream is that in the future we will be concentrating on a wellbeing agenda, building resilience in our kids, and actively aware of spotting early on the signs of trauma & dealing with it effectively & early.

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Ron Coleman and Karen Taylor have an international reputation as speakers and authors. They are the directors of ‘Working to Recovery Limited’ an innovative international consultancy, training and publishing company with a cutting edge approach to supporting and improving mental health provision.