- The Guardian, Wednesday 5 January 2005
Peter Beresford believes he is the first "out" mental health service user to become a professor. It is a flag he is proud to bear. And not just because he wants to be an inspiration to other people with mental health problems - a role model to those like himself who have been written off by society - but also because he believes it makes him a better academic.
As professor of social policy and a director of the Centre for Citizen Participation at Brunel University, he has drawn on his experiences of using mental health services for 12 years, including a stay in a psychiatric hospital.
Beresford's journey through the labyrinth of in-patient and out-patient care, from psychiatrists to psychologists, has equipped him to develop a new type of "user controlled" research where disabled people and other service users initiate their own research topics, come up with the questions and challenge knowledge based on traditional assumptions of validity.
In an essay on the changing role of the professor, which last year won him a national essay competition run by the National Conference of University Professors, Beresford argued that the inclusion of people into the higher echelons of academia with a wider range of perspectives, experience and understanding than the traditional middle-aged white male professor is the way to enhance knowledge.
Crediting women, black and gay academics for creating studies in feminism, gender issues and black and "queer" history, he writes: "Interest in an academic career has often grown out of people's personal experiences, its relation with the world that they live in, and the desire to address issues which have confronted them."
His own experience, he continues, "highlights the need to address the interconnections between the personal and the academic, and the gains that are to be got from doing so".
Beresford says winning the essay prize "feels like an incredible vindication" by his peers of his belief that "who you are, and where you come from, shapes how you understand and interpret things and develop knowledge".
Acknowledging that subjectivity can be beneficial is important for the development of social policy, he adds. "Historically, social policy has been about those who solve problems and those who are the problem, and never the twain shall meet," Beresford says. "What people like me are interested in, and can demonstrate, is that those who have been seen as the problem maybe have some very, very helpful things to offer in terms of developing the solution."
This philosophy underpins his work at Brunel and on the numerous service user advisory groups and networks in which he is involved. It is close to his heart. The walls of his small office on the west London campus, where he has been a professor for six years, are adorned with evidence that people with mental health issues have an important contribution to make - copies of newspaper articles he has written on the importance of user involvement, and photographs of himself in a professional capacity.
It may appear a far cry from the years Beresford spent as an unemployed, benefits-reliant psychiatric patient, diagnosed with anxiety and depression, and too terrified to leave the house.
Yet he says even now not a day goes by when he's not thinking what he can and can't cope with. "It will never go away," he says of his condition. "You have good moments and you have difficult times, and you need ways of getting through them, which may sometimes involve external interventions."
He has a softly-spoken, apologetic manner. "I had to deal with issues I couldn't believe were possible until I experienced them because they were so terrible," he says. Even now he finds it hard to talk about this period of his life. "It churns me up inside."
Trying to bring up a young family while on benefits tipped him over the edge. "Poverty was cataclysmic for me," he says. "It creates so much anxiety, such insecurity." Asked how his partner, Suzy, coped, he responds: "Suzy had a terrible time, as did the two older girls. I don't recollect a lot of their childhood. Of course it makes me feel bad."
Beresford describes madness as "everything flying out the window... It's about irrationality, unpredictability, which people find terrifying. But when it's happened to you, you can't run away from it, you have to deal with it."
Coming "out" at work was one coping mechanism; using his position as a professor to give mental health users a voice was another.
"The devaluing of who you are and what you have to say are experienced routinely on a daily basis," he says. "If I was to go on about it, it would be boring and repetitive."
As a teacher of social work, he was instrumental in ensuring that the new three-year degree course involves service users in selecting students, shaping the curriculum, and in the assessment process.
Their input is crucial, says Beresford, because the only way to really improve social services is not by restructuring departments but by seeing how policy works in practice on the ground, how it connects in a meaningful way with their difficulties.
He points to the introduction of direct payments for disabled people as a major achievement of the user involvement movement. "It allows mental health users to decide to use the money for preventative care," he says. "Before, that money would not have been available until they'd hit crisis and were in hospital. Now they can prevent going to hospital. People who, 10 years ago, would have been written off are now contributing in a real way. It's about becoming part of the landscape."
Yet he fears that the forthcoming mental health bill could force service users back into the shadows. He says of the government's approach: "If you want very controlling legislation that highlights lots of negative perceptions about people, those people aren't going to be persuaded that it's going to be a partnership and concerned about your empowerment."
If government was serious about tackling the stigma attached to mental health problems that prevent around four out of five people with long-term mental illness finding work - the lowest of any disabled group - it would introduce performance indicators, says Beresford, rather than what he calls "nice to nutters" public education campaigns.
He himself has sought "reasonable adjustments" under the Disability Discrimination Act that allow him to work on equal terms with non-disabled professors. That means being able to work from home if necessary, since agoraphobia has been a long-term problem, and having two years in which to file his expense claims, with money issues another legacy of his condition.
As the deadline looms, Beresford says he is gripped by an "irrational fear". It is a constant reminder of where he has come from and what he has achieved.
The CV
Age 59
Status Partner, Suzy, with whom he has four children.
Lives Battersea, south London.
Education Emmanuel grammar school; history degree from Oxford University; PhD in citizen involvement in public policy from Middlesex University.
Career 1975-77: lecturer in social administration at Lancaster University; 1990: lecturer in social work at West London Institute for Higher Education; 1997: director of Centre for Citizen Participation at Brunel University (which had absorbed WLIfHE); 1998: professor in social policy at Brunel.
Public Life 1980-1992: mental health service user; 1999: chair, Shaping Our Lives national user network; 2000: member, Joseph Rowntree Foundation Independent Living Committee; 2002: visiting fellow, School of Social Work, University of East Anglia; 2003: trustee, Social Care Institute for Excellence.
Interests 1940 BSA motorcycles; sitting in cafes; family.
