Sara Stanton
Article updated 31/1072007
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Sara is a Psychiatric Refuser and Survivor Activist. She has been involved in the service user / survivor movement over a number of years, from the early days of the founding of the National Self Harm Network (NSHN) , through to being very influenced by the Hearing Voices Network and critical psychiatry, mad politics and other (direct action) movements. She has personal and active experience of hearing voices and self harm.
Sara says:
I’m currently working within the Service User Directorate at Together, a national mental health charity. So much more than this though, and so importantly, I’m an athlete. These days, it’s a strange thing but it’s harder to tell people I run hurdles than tell them I hear voices. I run 100m/400m hurdles. I currently run for Enfield and Haringey Athletics club and am working with London frontrunners and open athletics to promote LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender people) visibility/ tackle homophobia in sport.
Athletics isn’t a therapy for me, or a coping strategy, or a model of good practice. Athletics teaches me so much about life and about myself. I can be very tenacious and as much as I can be social and creative, I crave solitude and peace. My voices stole that from me and the psychiatric system layered it with more damage. Athletics forces me to face many demons that I would prefer to avoid engaging with. But the benefits outweigh the demons, and wearing short sleeves again has been the most empowering and liberating experience for me in terms of accepting my scars. No Care Programme Approach can standardise that journey.
I first started using mental health services when I was 15; I was admitted to an adult psychiatric ward and it took me a year to get out. It took another 17 years to escape completely. Those early wounds are still healing as the wounds are deep and activism does not wipe out the pain or the damage caused to me by using mental health services. It’s taken me near on 20 years to scrap myself out of the gutter that the psychiatric system trod me into.
On reflection - my use of mental health services, I think of it like a bad ‘acid trip’ , I mean Lactic acid is nature’s way of gently reminding your legs that your head is suffering from delusions of grandeur –
what was I really thinking ? What were the doctors thinking?
If I bought into taking enough drugs, underwent enough therapy and accepted enough diagnosis and re-diagnosis - then finally one day the voices would stop? – thing is , like running – your body remembers very easily how to run slow, but very quickly forgets how to run fast. Like my self harm, Its taken many years to accept that I hear voices and accept them as part of who I am.
Read Saras´ and Louise Pembrokes´ article Accepting and working with voices here
Read Saras´ article Thoughts on defragmentation and hearing voices here
Comments
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Sara, I think you are quite simply fantastic