Parliamentarian

Luciana Berger MP is one of Liverpool's five members of parliament and since September she's also been Shadow Minister for Mental Health within Jeremy Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet (tellingly, there is no 'actual' Minister for Mental Health within the Cameron government...). Last October she was really supportive of the World Mental Health Day Festival which we co-ordinated at work and one of the things I spoke to her about then was how we could get her together with a selection of our work contacts (I hesitate to use the word 'stakeholders'!) to 'talk strategy'.

And so it was that today a group of about 80 of us (service users, service providers and service commissioners) gathered at the Quaker Meeting House for a couple of hours to talk about a wide range of topics including the benefits of peer support; the impact of austerity on mental health; the support needs of carers, the deaf community, people whose first language isn't English, refugees, and people who have been refused asylum; the need for social care, the 3rd Sector and mental health services at all levels to be adequately invested in; stigma; eating disorders; suicide prevention; the lack of emergency in-patient beds, the money spent on psychiatric versus psychological support, and much more. Including whether the privatisation of the NHS has already gone too far to be undone...

Luciana proved herself to be admirably on top of her brief and was as engaging as she was well-informed. Everyone I spoke to after the event was impressed by her and thought this should become a regular forum. Luciana herself seemed quite keen to repeat the experience too - so, here's hoping!

I didn't blip on Wednesday but I also want to note what a great focus group we had that night with 13 young people who talked to us about mental health crisis care from their own experience as users of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. They were a terrific bunch and I was really touched not only by their stories but by how informed and articulate they were. I've said it before but I really do get to meet some amazing people in the course of my work.



Let's have some Pixies... www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_aBmrYChfQ