I was under the support of St. John of God in Enfield for seven years living in one of they're studio flats, and I can really say about the organisation is that it is complete garbage really (and I do not say this lightly).
In all those years of being with never once was I properly treated with any real respect or as a ordinary human being. The support workers were completely patronising and condescending for the most part and talk down to you like you are a child (not a very good thing to do when trying to help a person recover from depression) and the management was exactly the same if not worse. The problem is that the general attitude that they seemed to have there was that they were doing something really important by supposedly 'helping' people who have difficulties and need to be treated in a certain way, to the point where it becomes a situation where it is 'them against the service users' who they seem to look down upon and will cover for one another if anybody has a problem with the way things are being run there.
I am not trying to say that caring for people who have difficulties in life, but when it gets to the point where the people doing this job are so filled with arrogance and self importance that they are actually acting like they are some sort of royalty that people should be overly grateful for then I do think that it becomes a bit of a problem. I am also completely serious when I say that this was the general consensus that I felt during my time living there, that the service users may as well have been peasants and the people that worked there were from a much higher and more privileged class of people who didn't have to answer to them at all. Sure they would pretend to listen sometimes and come over to my home with fake smiles and a fake attitude, but I never did feel that I was really being listened to and that a lot of the times the things that I spoke about with them which I thought would be helpful to my over all support and recovery just went straight over they're heads. After all I was just a service user to them who doesn't really know his own mind and shouldn't be taken that seriously, they knew better than me because of the position that they were in and the job that they were doing. But this is not the way that it should be. A person should not be judged just for having a label of 'mental illness' without properly getting to know the person first, especially when you are an organisation which is supposed to be helping people that have these challenges in they're lives and empowering them to do better, rather than treating them as though they have two heads or throwing them into the same category as all those other people that end up doing terrible things like murders and such who could also be considered to be mentally. When in reality these types of people only really represent a small minority of people that could be considered to have some sort of mental illness and a far different than people like myself who just suffer with depression or something and do not harm anybody.
Unfortunately though this is part of the stigma that is around at the moment to do with mental illnesses which you would not expect to find happening so much within an organisation like this where people are supposed to be qualified to be able to understand people better who suffer with these problems and to help them. All I found though was that they didn't even seem to care so much about this and what was more important to them was making sure that things ran smoothly and that the people living under they're care would carry on paying they're rent money and getting housing benefits without causing any problems, so that the money could keep coming in and they could carry on feeling important about themselves. Even if it did mean invading my privacy by coming in to my home whilst I was out, or threatening me, or trying to emotionally manipulate me and discriminating against me etc. Not recommended.
In all those years of being with never once was I properly treated with any real respect or as a ordinary human being. The support workers were completely patronising and condescending for the most part and talk down to you like you are a child (not a very good thing to do when trying to help a person recover from depression) and the management was exactly the same if not worse. The problem is that the general attitude that they seemed to have there was that they were doing something really important by supposedly 'helping' people who have difficulties and need to be treated in a certain way, to the point where it becomes a situation where it is 'them against the service users' who they seem to look down upon and will cover for one another if anybody has a problem with the way things are being run there.
I am not trying to say that caring for people who have difficulties in life, but when it gets to the point where the people doing this job are so filled with arrogance and self importance that they are actually acting like they are some sort of royalty that people should be overly grateful for then I do think that it becomes a bit of a problem. I am also completely serious when I say that this was the general consensus that I felt during my time living there, that the service users may as well have been peasants and the people that worked there were from a much higher and more privileged class of people who didn't have to answer to them at all. Sure they would pretend to listen sometimes and come over to my home with fake smiles and a fake attitude, but I never did feel that I was really being listened to and that a lot of the times the things that I spoke about with them which I thought would be helpful to my over all support and recovery just went straight over they're heads. After all I was just a service user to them who doesn't really know his own mind and shouldn't be taken that seriously, they knew better than me because of the position that they were in and the job that they were doing. But this is not the way that it should be. A person should not be judged just for having a label of 'mental illness' without properly getting to know the person first, especially when you are an organisation which is supposed to be helping people that have these challenges in they're lives and empowering them to do better, rather than treating them as though they have two heads or throwing them into the same category as all those other people that end up doing terrible things like murders and such who could also be considered to be mentally. When in reality these types of people only really represent a small minority of people that could be considered to have some sort of mental illness and a far different than people like myself who just suffer with depression or something and do not harm anybody.
Unfortunately though this is part of the stigma that is around at the moment to do with mental illnesses which you would not expect to find happening so much within an organisation like this where people are supposed to be qualified to be able to understand people better who suffer with these problems and to help them. All I found though was that they didn't even seem to care so much about this and what was more important to them was making sure that things ran smoothly and that the people living under they're care would carry on paying they're rent money and getting housing benefits without causing any problems, so that the money could keep coming in and they could carry on feeling important about themselves. Even if it did mean invading my privacy by coming in to my home whilst I was out, or threatening me, or trying to emotionally manipulate me and discriminating against me etc. Not recommended.