Appalling Lack of Support & Care

Over the holidays I learned that a colourful Birmingham UK mental health activist named Michael ' Mikki' Elvin had died in November of cancer.

Apart from the shock of hearing that Mikki - the name he preferred to use - had died I was, even as someone who had got on the wrong side of him a few times, really concerned that Mikki's body and personal belongings had been laying in a morgue for months because services and council officials had not been able to trace his next of kin .

Beyond the obvious sheer human tragedy of this I was also concerned because Mikki Elvin had chaired the Birmingham, the UK's second largest city, MH Patient and Public Involvment Forum, and this had resulted in him getting embroiled in a year long wrangle with the Commission for Patient and Public Involvment ,the Government quango that oversees the management of the national PPI Forum structure, at the same time as he was involved in legal action against Birmingham City Council Social Services trying to access basic MH services.

How on earth does meaningful Patient and Public Involvment result in this horrendous outcome?

The system invited Mikki Elvin to get ' Involved' and contribute as a patient but as soon as he became critical or unwell it lost sight of him as a patient and person and simply labelled him as a problem to be swatted and squashed. CPPIH and Birmingham City Council executives and lawyers had no problem digging up dirt on Mikki in the courts or behind the scenes but they and services made no real effort to find out anything about him.

Where was the care and support for this man?

This is a scandal and there should be an independent inquiry to establish whether the way the CPPIH and Birmingham City Council treated Mikki as a problem and failed to support him as a patient and PPI forum member contributed to his death. I strongly suspect that it did.

Mikki's website Jarmi is still online. Let the man speak for himself.

One Of Mikki's Mates : Pat from Albert Rd Day Centre

Mikki talked about Pat (left) at Albert Road Day Centre as someone he admired. He never divulged much about the background of others - like himself really , but it was easy to understand and see he had a great deal of sympathy for Pat .

In Oct 2006 the last Mikki said about Pat was he was not going to Albert Rd Day Centre because people had been encouraged not to depend on it and it had shut down some of its service level over time . It had been and still is an "evolving-closure" of service over time which skillfully avoided full statutory consultation and has whittled away patient numbers who attended.

This was a blow to Mikki - it had been his base and place where he found some fellowship.

The last he saw of Pat he told me was him looking for fag ends off the pavements locally ..

When Mikki had joined the local statutory Mental Health Patient and Public Involvement Forum in early 2004 he had seen it as a way of improving services and Albert Road itself . For a time it did improve . Mikki declared to all on the PPI that he was under strain in late May 2004 . In June he presented a PPI "Workplan" which had a very good theme of "Tracking the patient through the system " - and beyond in some cases ..