Seven ideals for kinder mental health care
Today’s question is about taking the idea of modelling self-acceptance into adult mental health services: How would services look if we compassionately accept that socially unwelcome thoughts and feelings are normal human experiences, and see them as misguided attempts at self-protection rather than intrinsically dangerous urges that must be chemically suppressed, amputated or locked away? I don’t have a full answer. But in a sense I have been working on this question for my whole career. So here are some basics: 1. We are all in this life together, learning as we go, trying to balance our needs with the needs of others, our uncertainty with some general rules. Every day we learn something new, see something differently, realise our earlier mistakes, understand where others were coming from. We need to be working alongside the suffering person as a fellow traveller, rather than ‘doing something to them’ or ‘knowing better’ than them. We need to be ok with knowing how much we don’t