Feature

Blooming good health

Nottingham’s Ecoworks Project is an inspiring example of how mental health service users can move from passivity to activity. Nigel Lee reports

Just a couple of miles from the centre of Nottingham is one of the country’s largest areas of allotments.

Many have been abandoned for decades and nature has taken over, making it an ideal setting to develop organic gardening and permaculture. Three years ago, six of the most overgrown allotments were taken over by the Ecoworks Garden Project.

Ecoworks is a local alliance between people who have had a mental health problem and people with an environmental interest. It grew out of the Nottingham Advocacy Group which has represented mental health services users for the last 10 years. It is now working with 50-60 people a month, offering a range of activities at a fraction of the cost of official day care services.

Where it differs from ‘day care’ is that it is open to people interested in environmental problems, and not just mental health users. ‘We have broken out of the stigmatised mental health ghetto,’ says Brian, Ecoworks’ development worker. ‘Our members are colleagues not cases.’

Brian has experienced mental illness, and has argued for mental health services which respect users’ own experiences.¹ The following comments about appropriate mental health services are based loosely on his work.

How we respond to mental illness depends on how we explain mental illness. The medical establishment has two basic explanations, associated with psychiatry and psychotherapy: psychiatrists explain mental illness as a chemical imbalance in the brain, their solution is drugs to redress this imbalance; psychotherapists explain mental illness as due to emotional imbalances associated with inappropriate relationships, particularly in childhood. Their solution is counselling to help people come to terms with past experiences in order to develop more effective coping strategies.

One alternative explanation is that mental illness is caused by people’s experience of powerlessness in relation to their social and/or physical environment. We know that mental illness is correlated with unemployment, low income, low status (including the effects of racism and sexism), poor housing and poor environmental conditions. This is in addition to the experience of powerlessness in personal relationships upon which psychotherapy focuses.

Overcoming the illness requires empowering people to change their environment. This has two components — strengthening people’s ability to act, and changing their environment to make it more supportive and less threatening.

Conventional approaches concentrate on the emotional and biochemical symptoms caused by powerlessness. They do the least necessary to enable people to function in the environment which made them ill in the first place. The ‘revolving-door syndrome’ — common in mental health services — should therefore come as no surprise.

Long-term recovery and prevention of mental illness would require professionals to work with patients to help them change their environment — transforming the ‘patient’ (a term which implies passivity and powerlessness) into an active ‘user’ or ‘client’ who can gain control over their mental health services, and then back into a ‘citizen’ playing a constructive role in their community.

Ecoworks has great relevance to this objective. It is partly modelled on a much more ambitious organisation in Berlin called Atlantis, which provides employment and training for people with mental health problems on ecologically innovative projects.

Ecoworks’ gardening project has grown from small beginnings. A lot of work went into clearing the overgrown allotments. One of the secret weapons is old carpets, which may take a year to kill off brambles and weeds but do so ecologically. A large hut was built out of materials salvaged from the demolition of a psychiatric hospital nearby. Participants can now cook their food on site as well as grow it.

Although there is a grand plan, the project has grown ‘organically’, according to participants’ needs and the needs of the site. ‘We are working with nature to make a garden design in harmony with nature,’ says Adrian, the project worker. ‘It’s a high-yield, low-maintenance system. People get into doing what they want and don’t feel guilty if they want to go into the hut and drink coffee.’²

There is a large variety of short-term tasks, allowing people to opt in and out easily. There is no separation between recreation, work and ‘training’. The social dimension is a built-in component, arising from doing things together. Two of the longest serving members, both called John, now have a separate allotment of their own. They call it ‘Fox Valley’ after the urban foxes which are frequent visitors. ‘It’s very tranquil and peaceful here,’ says one of the Johns. ‘It’s a magic place — you wouldn’t believe you’re near the city.’

Brian says: ‘Ecoworks gives participants a sense that they are creating a sustainable lifestyle and also connects them to ecological goals and interests, developing wider responsibilities and awareness. It saves on energy, pesticides, chemicals and water.’ Ecoworks also sees its work as playing a role in regenerating the local neighbourhood, and helping to defend the allotments against the pressures of developers.