Be inspired to join our HELP FORCE
...by the heartwarming stories of volunteers who are changing lives
ON The first Monday of every month, Janie Hunt tells complete strangers her deeply personal story in a talk at Surrey Recovery College.
This is a service run by Surrey and Borders Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, where ‘students’, people experiencing poor mental health, are coached by ‘teachers’, people who’ve lived through mental health problems themselves.
Although she finds it excruciatingly difficult to talk about herself, Janie, 55, explains to her classes how a deeply traumatic childhood caused severe anxiety and complex PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) that continues to this day.
Standing up to address a room full of strangers is a huge feat for Janie — her subconscious continually throws up distressing images, often when she’s least expecting them. An apparently innocuous event such as someone standing too close, can trigger a tsunami of emotion leaving her paralysed with fear.
But the hardest thing for Janie, a graphic designer, who is single and from Dorking in Surrey, has been to admit that she has a mental illness because for a long time, she feared judgement, stigma and discrimination.
‘even now, I struggle to say the words,’ she says. But she is so sure that the key to recovery is understanding the symptoms, she has pushed through her own discomfort to help others.
Working as a volunteer she now runs several courses, including one on understanding PTSD, for patients to help them understand their diagnosis. ‘every course is written and co-developed by a professional alongside someone like me with “lived” experience,’ she explains. ‘If they were led by a clinical psychologist, people wouldn’t feel the same connection. Me standing there saying: “I’m in the same boat as you. I have lived experience of mental illness,” is what makes it so special.
‘I can see by their body language that people instantly feel: “Well if she’s OK, then maybe I’m going to be OK.” ’
Last month in recognition of her achievements, Janie was nominated for Helpforce’s Volunteer of the Year Award, which is run by the charity now working with the Mail to encourage people to volunteer in NHS hospitals. As we reported yesterday, the number of readers who’ve signed up has hit 20,000 in just over a week — they’ve pledged an extraordinary 1.1 million hours.
Volunteers can help in a huge range of ways, from tending a hospital garden, to assisting stroke patients. Many volunteers use their own experiences as patients in their volunteering roles — such as at Surrey Recovery College. The idea emerged in the Nineties and many NHS trusts now offer these schemes. It’s an educational rather than therapeutic approach to mental well-being and relies on volunteers.
One of its guiding principles is personal responsibility, teaching that: you’re not a patient, you’re a student; the subject you study is your own illness and you can learn from others how to become an expert in your own self-care.
Janie took redundancy from a job in children’s illustration three years ago and began volunteering in September 2016 after doing some occupational therapy which involved making up care parcels for people entering mental health wards.
SHe
now runs between two and three eight-week courses a term, taking in around 36 students aged 18 and over — all referred by their GPs and suffering different mental health problems.
There are courses on understanding bi-polar, hoarding and personality disorders; others cover managing intense emotions, moving on from selfharm and suicide prevention — for this, she worked with actors to develop suicide prevention training and shared her experiences with the cast to ensure the videos shown during sessions, were realistic and sensitive.
She gives students lots of information about what goes on in the brain and teaches mechanisms to cope with the distress of flashbacks and nightmares. Janie’s helped people of all ages — from young adults to those in their 80s — some have battled with poor mental health all their lives. It’s something she understands because PTSD still affects her every single day.
A lorry coming up behind her in the street will make her feel vulnerable — someone passing too close to her in the supermarket will make her feel so threatened she has to leave.
‘A sudden noise or movement can give me the deepest sense of impending doom and I have no control over it,’ says Janie. ‘I will suddenly feel exactly as I did as a child — helpless, frightened, trapped . . . and there’s no escape.
‘So when someone says: “I have terrible flashbacks — how do I cope with them?” I’ll tell them how I manage. I use mindfulness to focus on my breathing which then calms my body down.
‘And I use distraction which helps to stop me slipping back into the past. It’s not about getting rid of these symptoms — because you may never fully lose them — the goal is to learn to manage them so you can live your life.’
Janie doesn’t remember a time as a child when she didn’t live in fear. ‘I never felt safe, never felt protected,’ she says. She does not want to go into detail about what happened to her but says as a child, she never knew happiness. ‘From the age of 15, I didn’t want to live. I’d never known warmth or joy, and I couldn’t see any point in living.’
Volunteering has helped with her self-esteem. Knowing other people rely on her helps motivate her on days when the world still seems a dark place. Students comment on her ‘kind, calm and caring manner’ and ‘Janie’s willingness to share and guide’. ‘Janie is fab,’ one says. ‘She speaks from the heart.’
Liz Holland, head of clinical effectiveness at Surrey and Borders partnership NHS Trust, who nominated Janie for last month’s Helpforce Awards, says: ‘Janie is so passionate about the idea of hope, she shares her experiences openly in order to help inspire others.
‘She has grown so much in courage and confidence through her volunteering work. I have been in the room when people have fed back how what she has shared has helped them in their own safety and recovery.’
Janie only sought help for her own problems in her mid-40s when she began to be poleaxed by terrifying flashbacks to childhood incidents. Her GP referred her for cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) but what she
would have liked then, is to talk to someone who had suffered a mental health crisis themselves, who understood the fear, isolation and shame.
‘The stigma was huge,’ she says. ‘I went for CBT every week but if the word “therapy” slipped out at work, I’d pretend it was physiotherapy rather than psychiatric therapy because I didn’t want anyone to know.’
As many as one in four of us will experience a mental illness at some point. Janie feels strongly that no one should have to go through the anguish she did. To begin, she was so lacking in self worth she couldn’t make eye contact with ‘students’. ‘I couldn’t believe how open everyone was about their difficulties,’ she says. ‘There was such enormous camaraderie and trust, and I found that incredibly moving.’
She takes on freelance work as an illustrator, but her teaching role — technically two days a week — but which in fact amounts to ‘uncountable hours’ is unpaid and money, she admits, is tight. But she says: ‘I’d rather be doing something I’m passionate about and which helps other people, than earning what I was before.’
Janie is careful not to give false expectations. ‘Everyone has bad days,’ she says. ‘What I want to get across to the students is that recovery is possible and it begins with learning as much as you can about your own illness and how it affects you.
‘The best thing I can do is give people the seed of kindness and help them to look after themselves. This is something most of them have never considered.’
Tears well in her eyes as she describes a student who completed the PTSD course last December and is back in full-time work. ‘She told me: “Meeting you and doing the course completely changed my life.”
‘You don’t go into volunteering expecting that kind of feedback. But to realise that you’ve really touched someone, and planted hope inside them when life was utterly joyless, that’s incredibly powerful.’