User and Carer Perspectives on Mental Distress – finding the meaning in distress situations

Duration: 5.01 mins 

Speakers: 

S1       - Interviewer, Tracey Holley
S2       - Pat Caplen

S1       So Pat, earlier on you were saying that you had various coping mechanisms for dealing with the distress that you were experiencing. Can you tell me a little bit more about them? 

S2       Yes, it’s rather strange really because most people see it as a hindrance but mine has been through hearing voices. At the age of about 6 I think I started hearing voices and they have helped me enormously. 

S1       So let me get this right, those voices weren’t causing you distress? 

S2       No. 

S1       They came about when you were distressed and they were? 

S2       Helpful. 

S1       Helpful. 

S2       I see it, it’s a bit like a cosmic internet. 

S1       You mean metaphorically? 

S2       Metaphorically speaking.   So that there are good websites and there are bad websites and I’ve learnt to, if I feel as if I’m going towards a bad website, I don’t go there and I aim towards the good websites as it were.  And therefore I just, the voices that I hear are purely of my benefit and they give me a better perspective on life. 

S1       Yeah, sure. It’s interesting that you use symbolism to help describe, you know, what you’re – you would be describing the indescribable – and I’ve known various people who’ve heard voices as well and it seems to me that, I don’t know what your take is on this but are they actually, if they have multiple voices for instance, are those multiple voices each representing some sort of theme or issue that is going through their lives that they can’t quite get their head around, you know, but only in terms of using symbols or visualisations? 

S2       I mean I can’t speak for other people because I haven’t really had the chance to speak to anyone who’s been able to – I’ve never been able to converse it like this. In my case it is multiple voices and .. 

S1       Do they cover various issues? 

S2       Oh absolutely.  Anything. And they’re really outside, very often completely outside my knowledge. I get information that I don’t know where I could have possibly got it from. 

S1       So they help you through the fog of confusion really. 

S2       Oh, totally. 

S1       Sort of guides. 

S2       Yes. Yes. Yes. 

S1       Right, OK.  

S2       And what do you use to help you to cope? 

S1       Well I think what I’ve found, I never have been able to cope alone before going through therapy – I had cognitive behavioural therapy – and a very therapeutic relationship with my therapist and it was, she taught me actually to honour my emotions for a start because the usual depressive thing, you know, saying negative, having negative automatic thoughts, you know, thinking only in the negative, and people around you get fed up about that and they say ‘oh, pull your socks up, there are other people worse off than you’.  But to my mind it was all relative and the fact that somebody had actually honoured my feeling, because it was a human response to an intolerable situation but what I actually found, yes it’s OK to feel through the pain and actually honour that emotional feeling. So I didn’t have any guilt about doing that. So before I would feel an emotion and on top of that mental distress itself I had my mother’s voice – or whoever – saying ‘oh pull your socks up, there are people worse off than yourself’, so I had the guilt. So it was a stigma and a guilt on top of everything else and then when I went into therapy I learnt to yes, recognise the emotion but don’t hold onto it too long and realise there were other, it’s just a thought or a feeling, it doesn’t necessarily make it a fact.  That sort of psychological toolkit I suppose that I have at my disposal now and I have actually become my own therapist, nobody else’s but my own, and that’s a coping mechanism for my continued recovery now. 

S2       Yes. I think you’ve actually answered the question there, you know, because it’s obvious now that we all, when we’re in a state of distress, need someone to help us, guide us through this. 

S1       Absolutely. 

S2       And perhaps people who are hearing negative voices are simply just crying out for somebody to understand what they’re going through. 

S1       Yeah, absolutely.         

END OF RECORDING