Description

By Helen Morrell

ISBN: 9781849915175
Published: 2011
Pages: 249
Key Themes: mental health, autobiography, recovery, empowerment

Description

Helen tells her own remarkable, uplifting and powerful story of living and working with sufferers of mental health problems. Included in her tales are first hand extraordinary life accounts written and told by some of the people she was lucky enough to have supported through difficult times in their lives.

She shares her experiences with passion and energy giving inspiration and the can do attitude to her readers in a subtle format. For 25 years she has worked with her heart and soul to help others. Her style is, at times, off the wall and eccentric and she has used these qualities to successfully run her community. At times she goes where angels fear to tread. By demonstrating times of laughter and sadness this is a book that should appeal to a wide audience as she takes you on a roller coaster of emotions.

About the Author

Helen Morrell is 52 years old. She lives in Norfolk with her soul mate and partner Dave and has four sons. Rising from a failed education, a teenage pregnancy, and market stall holder to running a therapeutic community she quickly established herself as a peoples person and a fighter for the rights of the vulnerable.

For 25 years she lived with and worked tirelessly alongside the worried well to the extremely disturbed mentally ill. All of these she sees as people just trawling lifes journey in their many colourful ways. Helen has a big personality and trades in the unorthodox. She is a fearless opponent but a compassionate and understanding friend though not without expectations. She successfully established a healing residential community and would run through brick walls for the good of her residents so they had every opportunity available to them to tackle their mental health.

Helen has a no nonsense approach to care, has no time for the idiosyncrasies of bureaucracy but equally expects her clients to work hard at using whatever resources they may have within themselves to improve their health. Within all this she assumes an innate ability to empathise and has an awareness of the needs of those sufferers of poor mental health.

Eventually she retired from the community with a view to continuing her work with the mentally ill away from the pressures and rigours she had previously experienced.