Creative Category: Stories

Sam O’Hara Childs tells Recovery Devon how becoming the hero of your own story can transform your mental health.

Here are some longer, more detailed stories as PDFs which you are free to download.

Suzan Arisoy: When I first started work at HUBB, in June last year, I had never heard of the ‘Recovery Model.’ Neither had I heard the term ‘Service User.’

My search for truth has taken me to places more bleak and terrifying than the Doré illustrations that are my constant companions. Now I am back in the place where I was born, trying to make sense of it all.

Twenty-two years ago I met Bill at a mental health meeting. We went insane. I was hospitalised and diagnosed bipolar.

Julie developed and edited the wonderful book, ‘A Gift of Stories’, while she was Commissioner for the Mental Health Commission, Wellington, New Zealand.

It seems to me that I made a choice of two roads when I was about eleven, though this will deal with about three critical years spent in and near the town where I grew up and from which I had left to be educated.

When I was asked to write this short piece it felt like an impossible task as I could fill a journal with our therapeutic journey from where you were to where you are now. I decided to concentrate on one aspect: finding the JOY.

Mum and I get on well now, but childhood was difficult for me and my elder brother. Dad was around but a lot of time away in the army.