Lights on the Bridge to Recovery
Karlo Mila-Schaff
The lens of pathology tends to have the monopoly on the way we view mental health illnesses and experiences. Alice Walker writes that: “We were not meant to suffer so much & to learn nothing.” Self-knowledge is one of the few gifts that can be associated with surviving the crisis, illness, and collapse of a serious mental health episode. Self-knowledge is often the only light at the end of a disastrous and devastating tunnel. How do we ensure that we then learn to value this knowledge, rather than stigmatising and medical-izing our own experiences and relegating these to silences, our unspoken darkness, joining other skeletons in the closet. How do we carry what we learn, like candles of light, to illuminate the rest of our journey? How do we pass these torches on to others?
We have stories and strategies of survival. Learning what ‘makes us well’, ‘what keeps us well’, and ‘how to stay well’ is the precious ore of resilience. It is hard-won. It is wisdom granted often at great cost. It is the elusive treasure of the many tests and quests for wellbeing involved in a mental health episode. It is so easy to bury these experiences in shame and forgetting. As we recover, and return to the ‘land of the living’ can we be brave enough to look back? Can we keep our maps and trace our pathways of healing? Can we look back at the tenuous lines we followed and recognise our own courage and tenacity in the journey of recovery? The biggest challenge, of course, is whether we can pass these maps, lights, stories and experiences on to those who need them - to those still standing on the other side of the bridge. And the corresponding sector-wide challenge is ‘how do we do this better’?