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What does therapist and former psychiatric nurse Phil Barker mean when
he says: "I have also always been uncomfortable with the power
associated with being a professional". Adam James finds out Name an
eminent thinker from 20th century psychiatry and mental health, and a
psychologist, psychiatrist or philosopher might spring to mind. It's
unlikely to be a psychiatric nurse. But if it was, it might be Phil
Barker. The 56-year-old has, for the last three decades, been at the
forefront in pushing for compassionate and ethical psychiatric nursing.
Specialising in psychotherapy he has had work published in around 30
books, been visiting professor at nine universities around the world,
and rose to become professor of psychiatric nursing practice at
University of Newcastle upon Tyne. With more than 80 academic papers
and magazine articles his contribution to psychiatric nursing,
psychotherapy and mental health, was in September last year,
acknowledged by Oxford Brookes University who made him an honorary
doctor. But Barker has now admitted it all has just not been enough.
He is tired both of the "diminishing returns" of academia and the
feeling that his professional persona creates a power gulf between him
and the service users he works with. So, in July last year , he
resigned from his professor post at Newcastle. Together with his wife
Poppy, a former social worker, the Scot is concentrating his efforts on
running their training consultancy, Clan Unity. Barker says: "It may
sound a bit smug, but I played academia as far as I could go. I reached
a point that I realised that I will be doing just more of the same."
"I have also always been uncomfortable with the power associated with
being a professional. To always be introduced as 'Doctor Barker', or
'Professor Barker' carries with it a lot of power. I have always been
interested in finding out what there was valuable in me as a person in
providing assistance to people." Humble words. Indeed, it is with
similar humility that Barker cites his most important achievement
during the last 30 years as being the creation in 1985 in Dundee of one
of the first community based self-help projects for women diagnosed
with psychotic illnesses. He says: "Because we were based in ordinary
settings there was much less stigma. It hit on the importance of taking
mental health out of the hospital. "That experience would have to be
the thing I am most proud of. Because they [the women] accepted me as a
human being. I learnt the power of ordinariness and humanity. That is
what I want to get back into." As is perhaps synonymous with being a
psychotherapist Barker is candid about his childhood years, including
his own "prolonged identity crisis" between the ages of 15 and 25 when
he would experience tactile and visual "hallucinations". "I would
experience gross distortions of space," he explains. "For example, when
in a room the walls would move away in a very surreal perspective. I
would feel my body was made of wax and very synthetic. This lasted on
and off for several years. But although it was initially a problem, it
was never disturbing." Ever since Barker, after graduating with a fine
arts degree, started nursing in 1969 he has been both a follower of
Buddhist philosophy and the existentialism of psycho****yst RD Laing.
Over the last three decades Barker has fused such existentialism with
psychotherapy and Zen teaching in the development of a "Tidal Model" of
recovery. One of its premises is that a person is "metaphorically
washed ashore" as a result of psychiatric crisis and suggests that
"once a crisis has been identified, the person's lived experience
becomes the centrepiece for an in-depth, collaborative assessment of
what 'needs to be done' to help to 're-float' the shipwrecked person."
Barker adds: "For me psychosis is an inherently meaningful experience.
I have never met anybody who was psychotic who did not make sense to
me. "For me what we call mental health problems are problems of being
human" Although a former professor in psychiatric nursing Barker has,
during his career, spent just one year working on acute wards.
Nevertheless, he has pushed hard for nurses to engage openly and
humanely with patients in the "milieu of an acute ward". He says:
"Time to do this, whether formally or informally, can always be found.
And if nurses say they can not it may be that they are fearful of what
that kind of engagement might involve. "Many feel, for example, great
anxieties about running group work. But group work can be an easy way
to engage with people." Clan Unity has, up to now, been running
workshops based on Barker's and his wife's shared premise that
"knowledge can only be gained through personal experience". As before,
Barker hopes such work will enable service users to find their own
avenues of recovery. "I am on a path in a Buddhist sense in the same
way as they are," he says. Source: Psychminded, 16/8/2003