“I would definitely recommend this course. I really enjoyed it. Top-notch trainer who was also easy to talk to.”

“It will help me see when I could end up in conflict with others. I think this course was spot on. I gained a lot of insightful knowledge about aspects of myself. It was really useful.”

The course was very well received. As one of the participants commented, “…in fact the people that attended were disappointed there wasn’t anymore! “

Other comments on the training included:

“Thought you pitched course well to include all ability/experience.”

“I have learned that I can/could train other people in a subject that is personal to me, which would make more of an impact than a professional view.”

“…I thought it was great. [The trainers] are excellent at running a group and delivering accessible training and very understanding and patient with our particular client group.”

“What a fantastic couple of days – workers and service users learning off each other. Thank you.”

“Enjoyed all the group work we did, especially the planning a training course.”

“I have learned so much around planning and delivering training, also that workers and service users have a lot to learn from each other.”

“Really enjoyed training. Pitched very well for our service users. Useful information. Enjoyed relaxed, informal but professional delivery.”

“Really found it useful and enjoyed the session.”

“Very cranially comforting and inspiring. I feel positive and less afraid.”

• Continue to offer training through our relationship with the Voluntary Action Sheffield Mental Health Training Project
• Expand geographically
• Develop as a social enterprise
• Seek funding for training for SUST members; training for service users; room hire; publicity; paid worker(s); an office base; national launch or conference

Although the majority of these free places are taken up, we’ve experienced considerable problems with non-attendance in the past – of the 32 free service user places granted in our 2009 Summer School programme, 12 (37.5%) were not taken up and of the 64 free places made available in our 2010 Summer School programme, 26 (41%) were not taken up. Recently, we put on a course where only 2 of the 5 people who had booked free places put in an appearance.

Sometimes the failure of people to attend without giving adequate notice means that we’ve been unable to offer access to our courses to people on waiting lists; at other times it’s meant that we’ve had to run courses with very low numbers (3 or 4 people), which can present problems for our trainers, especially when the training is built around active learner participation (and generally speaking, SUST training seeks to involve the people who attend as much as possible).

It costs money to run a training course – our direct costs for a half-day course are typically in the region of £235 – and it takes considerable voluntary effort to plan, market and administer our training programme. Bearing all of this in mind, what do you think we should do to address the issue of people failing to take up free training places in future?

“I would definitely recommend this course due to trainer, materials and group work involvement. DVDs helped immensely in learning. I really enjoyed it and got a lot from it.”

http://www.sheffield.gov.uk/caresupport/adults/asc/supportplanning/sptoolkit

On one level, ‘Painting the Rainbow’ can be read as the story of a somewhat lonely and isolated working class Sheffield lad growing up around Hillsborough and Stannington in the 1960s and 70s, taking on a deeply unfulfilling job before returning to education, experiencing a catastrophic breakdown and living with the consequences. Read as such, we might remember or learn some interesting facts about social history and respond to the author’s stance on the questionable value of mental health services and how it feels to be limited by the agents of social control, particularly the education system and the stifling Protestant work ethic it feeds into. But there’s something far deeper at the heart of Wayne’s story – the unfolding of a mission of redemption that has the power to change the world and will bring its protagonist a reward that will make his years of suffering worthwhile. Although the author makes no such claim, Wayne’s mission can be likened to the timeless Gnostic quest attributed to the Biblical figure of Simon Magus, a host of so-called heretical Christian sects that were overcome by the forces of orthodoxy, the compilers of the Nag Hammadi library and innumerable other barely remembered explorers of the psychedelic multiverse. This quest can be discerned in the work of William Blake, the visionary science fiction of Philip K. Dick and the music of David Tibet and Current 93 and was recently given popular expression through the film ‘The Matrix’.

Wayne possesses a remarkable clarity of recall and a sometimes surprising candour. His intention is not to make a good impression but to tell the truth about his experience. His childhood was plagued by bed wetting. He relates fond memories of his involvement in the scouts, particularly a two week camping holiday in Scotland. He remembers weekly visits to his granddad, a Little Mester who made knives and worked until he was 82. He talks about the harsh discipline enforced at Myers Grove comprehensive school and the acute embarrassment and lack of self-confidence that characterised his time as a student there.

Wayne left school in 1977 and became an apprentice painter and decorator for Sheffield council. For five years, he suffered crippling inertia in the company of a variety of unsympathetic decorating gangs, seeking occasional relief through bouts of heavy drinking and taking days off work, before being sacked for not earning enough bonus (mainly because he worked so slowly). It’s interesting to contrast Wayne’s astute self-analysis of his work days with the currently fashionable view that work is a universal panacea for good mental health, which is generally propounded by people who have well paid jobs and are respected for the positions they occupy in workplace hierarchies, and fails to acknowledge the question of the value of meaningless, repetitive, unfulfilling labour.   

Shortly before being sacked from the council, Wayne made the decision to return to education and paid to take some ‘O’ level courses at college. He began to read for pleasure in 1983, which was something new to him. Although he seemed to gain a lot from attending college, not everything in his life went smoothly. His parents divorced in 1983 after 26 years of marriage and he was subject to periods of anxiety and depression, which he sought to alleviate by going for long walks. After becoming increasingly withdrawn in 1984, Wayne participated in an 8 week Fresh Start return to education course before starting to study English Language and History at ‘A’ level. He enjoyed a thought provoking first year of study but he was troubled by mood swings and began to experience difficulties in sleeping. During this period of study, Wayne started to notice a fellow history student named Catherine, who plays a central part in Wayne’s thinking from that point on. As Wayne sees it, Catherine will be the reward for the successful completion of his mission of redemption and the thought of her sustains him throughout all the difficulties that follow. On a mundane level, it’s interesting to note that Wayne enjoyed his return to education because it was a path he chose to follow, in contrast to his unhappy school days and work years, which he suffered against his will.   

Wayne’s admission to hospital is preceded by a feat of athleticism that takes part in Hillsborough Park and his creative decoration (or wrecking) of a classroom at his old school, where he went to study one of his ‘A’ levels. From Wayne’s perspective, these actions were necessary to bring about profound change in the world, and to bring him the reward of Catherine. Wayne frequently mentions his isolation and susceptibility to depression and anxiety before these events but the experience that led to him being sectioned seems to belong to a different order. 

Although we read that:“The Wayne Clay who entered the Northern General Hospital, with …one injection was gone forever,” much of his time there was boring and repetitive, a round of comical exercise classes, bad food and medication. There are implicit criticisms of the mental health system in his descriptions of the agonising physical side effects of the drugs he was prescribed and the two minute conversations with his psychiatrist that led to him being diagnosed as suffering from delusions of grandeur, then with schizophrenia, before settling on manic depression. He did, however, quite enjoy art and pottery classes on the ward and he found the weekly therapy sessions he participated in quite useful. He also found solace in solitary walks around the hospital wards and grounds. On one notable occasion, Wayne embarks on an epic pilgrimage from the hospital grounds to Catherine’s home in Stannington (he can’t find much to say to her when he gets there), which ends with him being picked up by the police and returned to hospital after taking a bath in a show home on the estate where she lives. The hospital experience might have been a bit dull but at least it gave him time to sort out his thoughts and make sense of what he was thinking and feeling, unlike his time at school or as a council worker.    

Wayne reports some unusual thoughts relating to his time at the Northern General, including a heightened fear of radiation and a belief that he had lived in ancient Egypt. He felt very speedy to begin with and had some difficulties in recognising his brother. In the ‘Hospital’ chapter of the book, Wayne also outlines the belief underpinning his mission, which can be summarised thus: Wayne was from another planet, the father of three sons who presented themselves as gods and tortured the inhabitants of the world for their own amusement; Wayne’s mission was to prevent them from destroying the planet completely. It is this dark cosmic fantasy, if that is what it is, that can be interpreted from the standpoint of Gnosticism, whereby Wayne can be seen as the repository of the divine seed that has fallen into the world of creation; his sons can be likened to the archons of the demiurge, who cast a veil of illusion over those whom they seek to dominate or feed upon; where Wayne also represents a saviour figure intent on spreading knowledge to others, thus enabling them to experience freedom; and where Catherine represents Sophia, or the divine feminine, who rescues or is rescued by the protagonist in the battles against the agents of oppression.    

Although he had been allowed to make regular weekend visits home, his discharge from hospital comes without warning. It’s unclear how long he was an inpatient; as Wayne himself acknowledges, his perception of time was condensed. Wayne felt like an empty shell after his ordeal. He visited his psychiatrist on a fortnightly basis and he enjoyed regular contact with his family. He re-enrolled on his ‘A’ level courses but his motivation for study deserted him. After failing his exams, he took to drinking and excessive eating in the pubs that lined the route from the city centre to Hillsborough. He gains three and a half stones in weight, laughs out loud in pubs and at bus stops and notes that people whom he has never met before know his name and are aware of his mission. His obsession with Catherine continues – on one occasion, he visits her at one o’clock in the morning – and it is not until 1990 that he finally realises that she doesn’t want anything to do with him.

In December 1988, Wayne starts an employment training scheme, which doesn’t work out. He gets a council flat in Stannington, joins a job club but gets thrown out, comes off medication for a time but resumes taking the pills in 1992, when he is also signed off sick and qualifies for Invalidity Benefit. He decides to write his life story at the suggestion of his father and he ends his narrative in 1993 wondering if he was indeed the bearer of prophecy, or whether his mission was the result of a hallucination he had while he was “in cloud cuckoo land.”  

Wayne promotes true individualism and independent thought. ‘Painting the Rainbow’ contains his fascinating interpretation of the story of the boy who cried wolf, which attributes the blame for the catastrophe that befalls them to the townspeople for entrusting an important task to someone who was clearly not up to it. Elsewhere, this militant individualism is more troubling. For example, although it was important that Wayne should refrain from having sex in order to fulfil his mission, he argues in favour of pornography, presenting it as a portrayal of natural bodily functions engaged in by consenting adults and suggesting that people who oppose pornography “don’t want other people to think for themselves.” There’s also something alarming about his attitude towards Catherine, which fails to take account of her integrity as a person, and treats her as an object (or an archetype); at one point he states that she wouldn’t have existed if it wasn’t for him, and that he created Catherine by choosing her as the reward for the fulfilment of his mission. 

Ultimately, the value of ‘Painting the Rainbow’ resides in the fact that it is an account of unusual experiences provided by the person who went through them, rather than a case study couched in pseudo-medical jargon by a mental health professional. Wayne’s sometimes fascinating, troubling and insightful story retains its authenticity and integrity because it is a firsthand account that retains a meaning it could not possess if it had been mediated by an outside authorial voice. ‘Painting the Rainbow’ is recommended reading for anyone who believes that self-expression provides a key to understanding what is commonly dismissed as ‘psychotic illness’.

‘Painting the Rainbow’ is available for £4 from: Asylum Associates, Limbrick Centre, Limbrick Road, Sheffield S6 2PE.

A shorter version of this review appears in Your Voice No. 61, Autumn 2011

It was a long time ago and truth moves with the now, covering the past so that it can only be retrieved as fiction, but I’m convinced that everything was basically okay as I made my way from Sheffield to Brighton on that sunlit autumn day. I’d successfully removed myself from the oppression and indignity of the welfare benefit system. I worked for an income, and yet I retained the leisure time necessary to pursue my deeper interests (the accumulation of mystical experience, deepening awareness of religious truth, the penetration of the mysteries…) Let’s say I was happy to travel to Brighton, because it was a bright town, and it is always good to see the sea.

In Brighton he gained invisibility / by dissolving himself into light…

I’d been to the place before, heeding a TOPY summons, travelling through the soft South Downs at a leisurely place to get there, popping into the photo booth on arrival to engage in ritual performance, thinking of a god as the flash fired four times, sending the resulting images into the world, giving the recipients extra reasons for living. That set the tone, and the brick built church down the hill looking left out of the station was the eidolon of my engagement. I saw it, and it was not there, a consummation of deeper reality. I went into a café and asked the people who worked there to play the tape I had with me, and they complied because there was no reason not to. And I walked along the streets of the town and made everything mine in passing.

I still can’t say for sure why dread hit me so hard on the pebble beach beneath the sun drenched sky. Perhaps it had something to do with an uninvited identification with the broad expanse of ye vasty briny ocean, which stretched before me without end. Perhaps the disorienting effect of the size and luxury of the hotel room I was staying in played a part. Perhaps the air of the conference hall I’d come from had been poisoned by the profusion of purple clad psychotherapists and other oppressive phantoms that ranged about the place replete with sickening self-regard (these mugwumps were certainly not my droogs). Perhaps there was something in my past experience that had primed me for panic and lurked within me just waiting for the opportunity to manifest. I’d swooned and shivered for months on end without knowing why after leaving home and moving to London at the age of 16. I vividly recall an out of body experience that came out of nowhere as I walked down a nondescript street of the capital city, in which all elements of my non-physical being suddenly left my corporeal shell to behold my body from a great height for a timeless eternity of I don’t know how many seconds. Whatever the cause, I’d somehow entered another world. It wasn’t just a question of perceiving space and time in a different way;  everything outside and within me had been hideously transformed.

I left Brighton for Sheffield the following day. I endured an agonising train journey of fantastic duration (and the fantastic was in league against me). I tried to take comfort in the inwardly vocalised thought that home would provide a refuge but this desperate incantation could not prevent the growing intensity of the existential crisis I was subject to.  As pain is the stimulus of pain, so fear is the stimulus of fear. My condition did not improve. I had embarked on a nightmare pilgrimage, which can be summarised by saying that I lived in continual fear of death, and knew with certainty that death would be just the beginning of my troubles.  

I started to feel a bit better the following year but I was still very fragile. Somehow I managed not only to attend a job interview the following spring but also to land the job. I found it somehow comforting to reflect that the inward desolation I was experiencing was not immediately apparent to others. The fact that “it does not necessarily show” has remained with me ever since. My new job involved a lot of travelling and I managed to battle through the agony as I explored the U.K.’s railway network. You could say that each individual journey, each night in a modestly comfortable hotel, each work related event I managed to push myself through represented a small victory.

About a year after my experience in Brighton, I found myself smiling as I read ‘Head On’, the Dionysian autobiography of the musician Julian Cope, on the train from Sheffield to Birmingham. This was a real breakthrough. Since freaking out on that pebbled shore, I’d been unable to concentrate enough to read a book (through the necessity of devoting most of the power of my mind to the certainty of imminent catastrophe). Whatever his failings, and you could argue he has many, I’ve felt a fondness for Saint Julian ever since. 

A fellow by the name of Thighpaulsandra played keyboards in Julian Cope’s band and he was also a member of the group of explorers of the psychedelic multiverse that went by the name of Coil. Jhonn Balance (may he be bathed in perpetual light) was the singer in Coil, and he was also a renowned collector of the art of Austin Osman Spare. Spare is commonly identified as the progenitor of Chaos Magic, and the foundation texts of Chaos Magic are ‘Liber Null’ and ‘Psychonaut’ by Peter Carroll. In ‘Liber Null’, Carroll states that altered states are the key to magical powers and that sensory overload in the form of fear can result in one pointed consciousness, or gnosis. I certainly didn’t associate my time of tribulation with gnosis, or anything remotely positive, but Carroll’s remarks offer a means of attributing positive value to what had previously been fixed as negative experience. There is great value in any work that enables the possibility of re-evaluation. I’m particularly interested in the idea that the most striking experiences that one might encounter during the course of a lifetime do not possess fixed meaning and can be seen in a radically different light as a result of encountering information many years later.   

Of course, there was a diagnosis attached to my experience, and treatment followed diagnosis as surely and relentlessly as day follows night. To my mind, the diagnosis does nothing to clarify the meaning of what I went through but rather diminishes it, and I remain entirely unconvinced that the medication I was prescribed did anything to ease my plight. William Blake described his condition as ‘Nervous Fear’, and this makes more sense to me than any modern diagnostic category, although the somewhat comical resonance of Blake’s term is at odds with the horror I knew.

All of the stories we tell ourselves in our attempts to make sense of our experience have to end somewhere. When all’s said and done, I’m glad that I went through what I went through (admittedly, this sense of gladness can only exist because I’m no longer in that state). It wasn’t a breakdown, or an illness, or the result of a chemical imbalance in my brain; rather, it was a revelation. It’s necessary to realise that you’re confined in an arid desert before you can ever hope to find your way out.

IO PAN!

Percy Perdurabo

‘Waves of Fear’ is the stand out track from ‘The Blue Mask’ by Lou Reed. The lyrics of the song, and the spiky guitar lines courtesy of Robert Quine, provide a fair approximation of the panic experience for those with an ear for avant-garde popular music.

A shorter version of this article appears in issue 60 of Your Voice magazine (Summer 2011)

The survey report includes the following findings:

- Younger adults with physical disabilities and younger adults with learning disabilities were more likely to have held their personal budget for longer than older adults and younger adults with mental health conditions.

- Younger adults with physical disabilities and younger adults with learning disabilities were more likely to have received social care support before their personal budget than older adults and younger adults with mental health conditions.

- The median weekly amount of personal budgets was lowest for older adults (£133 per week), compared to younger adults with mental health conditions (£160 per week), younger adults with physical disabilities (£188 per week) and particularly younger adults with learning disabilities (£221 per week). Older adults and younger adults with mental health conditions were more likely to have lower value personal budgets (£1-£200 per week), and less likely to have high value personal budgets (£501 or more per week) than younger adults with learning disabilities or physical disabilities.

- Younger adults with learning disabilities and older adults were more likely to get help from family or friends than other groups, and younger adults with mental health conditions were more likely to get help with planning from someone independent of the council/NHS…

- In terms of getting information and advice, older adults and younger adults with physical disabilities reported that the council made it easier to get information and advice than younger adults with learning disabilities and younger adults with mental health conditions.

Further details and copies of the report can be found at: http://www.in-control.org.uk/4466.aspx