Celebrating 15 years
Welsh mental health charity Hafal helps people with mental illness, and their carers. Here, chief executive Alun Thomas looks back at the charity’s first 15 years and looks ahead to the challenges it faces.
HAFAL, Wales’ principal charity for people affected by serious mental illness, turned 15 this year.
It’s been an incredible time, and I feel very privileged to have been a part of that journey from the very start.
Previously we were simply the Welsh branch of the National Schizophrenia Fellowship, but in 2003 we became an independent Welsh charity and we called ourselves Hafal (which means “equal” in Welsh).
That gave us the impetus to do something bold and different.
Led by service users and carers, Hafal has achieved truly incredible things in its first 15 years.
For a start, we’ve expanded a little. In 2003-2004 we had just 81 staff. Now we have more than 330.
Back then we had a £2.9m turnover; now it’s nearly £10m. And our membership has more than doubled to more than 1,000.
More importantly, in our first 15 years we have delivered some of the most innovative mental health services in the UK – and they all have one thing in common: they are led by the people who use them.
These recovery-focused services have been delivered in every county of Wales, each engaging our clients with our unique Recovery Programme and empowering them to write their own holistic care plans covering every area of life: from treatments to social life, from employment to physical health.
We know from experience that for mental health services to work, they need to put patients in control of their own recovery, and give them the opportunity to plan step-by-step their journey to their goals.
Our recovery-focused services have also included the first national advice service for people with a mental illness who experience money difficulties; an online community for people in Wales affected by mental illness; a recovery centre providing motivational activities such as kayaking, canyoning and trekking; and our very own inpatient service, Gellinudd: a ground-breaking facility which won an international award for best practice. And that’s to name only a few.
In our first 15 years we have also proved ourselves as an outstanding campaigning organisation.
As a service user and carer-led charity, our collective voice – the voice of experience – has grown louder and louder, and has reached many ears. In 2006, law-making powers for Wales were gained through the Government of Wales Act 2006. This enabled us to successfully campaign for a Welsh mental health law, which was passed in 2010.
The Mental Health Act focuses on compulsion – those instances when service users’ rights are taken away – without giving patients any rights to treatment in return.
The new Welsh legislation – the Mental Health (Wales) Measure 2010 – helped to create a balance, with the right to early treatment and a comprehensive care plan in place alongside the Act’s use of compulsion.
We also campaigned vigorously for the right to a comprehensive care and treatment plan to be written into the Welsh Code of Practice for the Mental Health Act, giving patients in Wales a significant new right to have all of their needs considered.
Of course, our success is best demonstrated not in our broad achievements, but by individuals’ stories.
We have seen so many of our clients flourish in our projects across Wales, and what’s particularly exciting is that many have gone on to become volunteers and members of staff at Hafal.
It’s extremely gratifying to watch people achieve incredible things and share their recovery insights and stories with others.
However, 15 years on, there is still much for us to do.
In 2018 we are still campaigning for the outdated Mental Health Act to be replaced by a fairer and more humane law. Many of our members have been detained under the Act, so we are acutely aware of how it fails to protect people’s rights and dignity, and how it excludes them from decisions about their own care.
We want to see a Mental Health Act that puts the person at the centre, ensuring they are listened to, informed and able to have a real say in what is happening to them.
Just as importantly, we still need better-resourced mental health services. Fifteen years ago mental health was seen as the “Cinderella” service of the NHS. That hasn’t changed.
In Wales today, services vary considerably in availability and quality. With the need for services increasing year on year, mental health continues to be under-funded and, put simply, has not been invited to the ball.
In 2018, people with a serious mental illness and their carers still face a number of appalling and unacceptable inequalities in their physical health, finances and employment.
People with a serious mental illness such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder can have a life expectancy between 15 to 20 years lower than the general population.
Recent changes to benefits mean that many of our members are living on less and less, with huge implications for their quality of life. And the barriers to employment facing people with a mental illness are still considerable.
Finally, in Wales today we still see an atrociously high proportion of people with a mental illness embroiled in a criminal justice system which is in no way set up to help them.
With so much injustice to combat, and with so many opportunities for us to innovate with our patient-led services, we have much to achieve in the next 15 years. We hope you will support us.