Bill
Gordon is the overall Project Leader of the
Tidal Model programme at Birmingham and Solihull
Mental Health NHS Trust. Here, in the narrative
spirit of the Tidal Model, Bill gives a personal
account of himself and his relationship with the
project.
Born in the USA, I have been
living in England since 1976. In 1958 at the age of
16, whilst growing up in the USA I was hospitalised
for three months in a psychiatric unit in Harvard
Connecticut following an acute ‘nervous breakdown’
at boarding school. Looking back, I still have no
idea what that was all about except that it changed
my life - totally.
Because of the ‘rupture’ or ‘tear’ in the fabric of
reality I experienced at that time, I started off on
a very long journey of inquiry, one that I now like
to call The Project. The ‘tear’ I experienced then
also felt like an open wound in my heart that just
would not heal. Terms like ‘growing up absurd’ in
1950’s and 1960’s America now come to mind as well
as RD Laing’s analysis of ‘ontological insecurity’
and Herbert Marcuse’s ‘ The Great Refusal’. It was
all that and much more.
In the years following, I learned to cope with the
emotional pain, the crazy perspectives and insights
I was having most of the time by using lots of drugs
and alcohol and by ‘acting out’ in ways that more or
less ensured that I would eventually get into
serious trouble. I had little difficulty
encountering others, similar to myself ‘out on the
edge’ so to speak. This was both comforting and
empowering in a negative sort of way. Despite this I
went on to University where I studied Philosophy
until in 1963 I was expelled just before graduation,
along with about 20 others for drugs offences.
We were all scattered to the four corners of the
earth. One of us became a well-known artist, one
became a bank president, and one went into a
Buddhist Monastery, one committed suicide. I don’t
know what happened to the rest. Following my
expulsion from University I lived in New York City
on the Lower East Side for about a year and then
spent two years in Europe bumming around ‘on a shoe
string’. I lost a lot of weight and became
increasingly radicalised politically as well as
philosophically as I kept my drug and alcohol levels
‘up to scratch’.
I wound up, unexpectedly, at a Christian community
in Switzerland where after three months I ‘saw the
light’, as it were, and committed, myself, aged 24,
to what I can only describe as the historic
Christian path of recovery from both personal and
cosmic dysfunction. I then got married, returned to
the States settled down (as you eventually do),
stopped using drugs and drinking to excess but
secretly continued with The Project ‘after hours’,
as my personal library kept growing and I kept
asking even more awkward questions along the pathway
of my life. I found my questions and dis-ease echoed
in many of the books I read, and this was
reassuring.
From 1978-1985, having settled with my growing
family in the UK, I did my psychiatric nurse
training, and worked as an RMN at Hellesdon Hospital
in Norwich. But feeling more and more frustrated
within the very limited horizons and
institutionalised attitudes of British NHS
psychiatry in 1985 I left the NHS to set up, with my
wife Norma, a residential drug and alcohol treatment
centre for women and their children.
From 1985-1998, in my capacity as Director of Hebron
Trust and project leader of Hebron House, I
developed, with our staff team, an innovative client
centred therapeutic programme centred around the
practice of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics and Narcotics
Anonymous. We were able to see, at first hand, the
amazing power and effectiveness of a spiritually
based programme, especially in working with female
addicts, many of whom had a psychiatric history with
so called ‘dual diagnosis’.
During that time I conducted workshops and teaching
seminars on addiction recovery and spirituality in
relation to mental health in England, Scotland and
the Czech Republic and I acted as a consultant to
other projects in the UK, Eastern Europe and Africa.
Hebron Trust is a founding member of EATA (European
Association for the Treatment of Addiction) and
continues to do good work.
After leaving Hebron Trust in 1998 (which coincided
with the break up of my first marriage) I was able
to earn a living for a few months by conducting
‘relational audits’ at a number of residential drug
and alcohol treatment centres in the UK but soon saw
that I could not really earn a living that way.
In 1999 I moved to Birmingham and lived on my own
for about a year and half. I learned how to cook for
myself. I returned to nursing, fell in love, and got
married again. Since returning to mental health
nursing (something I vowed I would never do) I have
been working for the Birmingham and Solihull NHS
Mental Trust, first as an A Grade whilst doing the
return to nursing course, as my registration had
lapsed over the years.
It was during my ‘return to nursing’ course that I
discovered Phil Barker’s The Philosophy and
Practice of Psychiatric Nursing on the shelf
at Waterstones. I could not put it down until I had
read the whole book. At last, I thought, someone as
crazy as me but STILL working in the NHS mental
health system! That gave me hope. Once back on the
Nursing Register, I progressed fairly quickly form D
to G Grade and have been working part time (three
days a week) for the last two and half years as the
Lead Tidal Model Project Nurse.
The story of how that hope in the possibility of
significant change began to merge with and to grow
with the hope of fellow colleagues within the
Birmingham and Solihull NHS Mental Health Trust is
told in ‘ The Tidal Model and the Reform of
Nursing Practice’ which is now available in
both an electronic version and a hard copy via the
Tidal Web-site.
In addition to my part-time (three days a week) work
with Trust I also began working on a
dissertation-based part-time PhD in Contextual
Theology at the University of Birmingham. My thesis
title is ‘Personal Testimony as a Source and
Criteria of Truth”
At 61 I remain, without regret, on a rather
unpredictable journey that enables me to grow in
sanity and in compassion whilst at the same time
keeping in touch with the wild and crazy side of
myself and others. “It takes one to know one” as
they say. I have three grown up sons from my first
marriage and now have a lovely daughter (Hannah
Rose, aged 2) from my second marriage to Carol.
Carol is a GP with whom I can discuss the medical
model!.
My hobbies are postmodern philosophy, Byzantine
theology, keeping up to date on cultural and social
trends (cool!), jogging, cycling, hill walking,
travelling, listening to all kinds and genres of
music, and writing. I am, in my old age,
inexplicably getting rather fond of Cowboy Music and
the late Johnny Cash. I blame this on Radio 2, which
I often listen to while washing up after tea,
especially in its new digital format.
In conclusion, it seems to me, one aspect of my
involvement in The Project has been the need for me
to constantly reflect on the course of my own
recovery and to realise that I am a fellow traveller
with other recovering people even though we may be
walking quite different paths. So what I have called
The Project has sort of merged with what Phil and
Poppy have been calling the Tidal Model.
Keeping focused on The Project is essential for me
(some might call it a life-time Research Programme)
because this focus expresses my personal need to
keep in touch as much as I am able with my own
reality, the reality of other people, and the
reality of God and God’s will for my life. As for
the Tidal Model it is good to be in the company of
fellow travellers!
So what IS.... THE PROJECT?
‘It is not mine in particular’”, says the
Jewish scholar James Kugel “ many people have
worked at it. Perhaps it began for me at the time of
the Vietnam War, or perhaps even before that. Events
conspire to put you on the spot, to cause you to
make some fateful decision. And just then, facing
life’s jagged teeth, you suddenly feel a certain
clam and a sense of the realness of things that
isn’t there most of the time, the realness of
yourself as one distinct person, and certain ideas
go through your head. I few years pass, perhaps.
Then on a day that you have set aside, sitting on a
park bench above some municipal lake, you try to
smooth things out in your mind, until the surface of
the lake subtly starts to seem like an image of your
mind, and once again you have a different sense of
things. It is then that the Project can present
itself most forcefully, re-emerging from wherever it
may have been waiting. The Project is: to get to the
bottom of this, to see how far it goes; not to
deceive oneself, not to be sentimental or weak, but
to see how far one can go “….
Read
Bill and his colleagues' report on their Tidal
evaluation
