Remarkable Lives – a series of students’ mental health recovery narratives

“Remarkable lives” is a series of recovery narratives (RNs) that, at time of writing, comprises of 20 published accounts of mental health recovery written by university students on their recovery journeys, all co-authored by Professor Jerome Carson.

This is how the project began:

“Remarkable lives followed on from an earlier series of five papers, called ‘recovery heroes.’ After this first series, the historian Liz Wakely and I wrote about four ‘historical recovery heroes,’ Charles Darwin (Wakely and Carson, 2011a), Isaac Newton (Wakely and Carson, 2011b), Florence Nightingale (Wakely and Carson, 2011c) and Winston Churchill (Wakely and Carson, 2010). For the book Mental Health Recovery Heroes, we added Abraham Lincoln (Davies et al., 2011). The ‘recovery heroes’ idea had been inspired by Patricia Deegan in her classic paper, ‘Recovery as a journey of the heart’ (Deegan, 1996). This remains one of the most influential papers in the contemporary history of mental health recovery. In this paper, one of the things she suggested to new mental health professionals was, ‘[…] to suspend their perception of people as chronic mental patients and to try and see the individual as a hero […] could you have survived what this individual has survived?’ (Deegan, 1996, p. 95). That image stayed with me and led to the ‘recovery heroes’ idea. After the historical series was completed, I thought about a new idea and came up with the concept of ‘remarkable lives’. The first two people featured were Peter Bullimore (Bullimore and Carson, 2012) and Julie Liebrich (Leibrich and Carson, 2012). Peter is well known for his work with the Hearing Voices Network and the Paranoia Network. He is one of the most gifted people that I have ever met and probably a better clinician than I could ever be. Julie was the author/editor of ‘A Gift of Stories’ (Leibrich, 1999), which Dr Glenn Roberts described as the best book of recovery stories published in the early days of the recovery movement. My move to Bolton saw a continuation of the series, but now mainly featuring University students, the focus of this review. What is a remarkable life? It is many things. To my mind, it is how an individual has battled against great mental adversity and ‘come out the other side’. Their stories can serve as a huge inspiration to others” - Jerome Carson.

The full list of RNs is as follows:

Remarkable lives: Lígia Cardosa Baldé in conversation with Jerome Carson

Remarkable lives: Kayleigh Beard-Blackband in conversation with Jerome Carson

Remarkable lives: Chanell Cumber in conversation with Jerome Carson

Remarkable lives: Maddi Faith in conversation with Jerome Carson

Remarkable lives: Patsy Flanagan in conversation with Jerome Carson

Remarkable lives: Christopher Fox in conversation with Jerome Carson

Remarkable lives: Andrea Handley in conversation with Jerome Carson

Remarkable lives: Spencer Insley in conversation with Jerome Carson

Remarkable lives: Caitlin Jenkins in conversation with Jerome Carson

Remarkable lives: Robert Lawrence in conversation with Jerome Carson

Remarkable lives: John McManus in conversation with Jerome Carson