Mind matters

By Kath Gannaway
A GROUP of people touched by mental illness plan to build a very different type of community to reach out to people struggling to cope with life’s challenges.
The Community Healthfulness Co-operative launched its strategic plan at a fund-raising concert at Badger Creek on Sunday.
The co-operative rose from the experience of Yarra Glen resident Nicholas Meinhold.
Mr Meinhold, now 30, told of his own experience of the mental health system which saw him as a teenager and young man dealing with multiple diagnoses.
“I made a lot of bad choices and went further down a fairly destructive cycle until I found myself in a psych ward with psychosis,” he told an audience at Nolan’s Vineyard.
Ultimately it was left to his parents and to himself to navigate the unmapped and rocky road to recovery.
“I was medicated and shipped home to my parents to deal with what was a bad situation,” he said.
“It took five or six years for me to just start functioning,” Mr Meinhold said and it was that journey which led him and his family to look for some alternative to the system.”
Having completed a maths and computer science degree, and a year of acting classes, which he admitted “scared me more than anything,” he is now in the second year of a medical degree with plans to study psychiatry.
His story has resonated with others in the community who have joined Mr Meinhold in forming the Community Healthfulness Cooperative.
The co-operative’s strategic plan includes setting up a 20-room step up/step down facility for people with mental illness, and others struggl-ing to cope, on rural land donated by Mr Meinhold’s family.
The co-operative model is a move away from what Mr Meinhold described as an outworn paradigm of service provider and beneficiary as two separate and distinct entities.
“We operate as a group of equals where each member is responsible for the health and wellbeing of the entire co-operative,” he said.
“There is a desperate need for this type of facility,” said co-operative member Catherine Nolan. “The idea of the facility is to provide ongoing respite for people who need it but with the definite goal of everyone working as a team to promote self confidence and a sense of belonging.”
Healesville resident Val Groenhuizen also supported the concept.
Her son Rodney committed suicide in 2004 after many years of struggling with mental health conditions and a system which offered no answers.
She said the type of facility planned by Community Healthfulness was her son’s dream.
“He had a dream that there would be a safe place, a harbour where people could go when they felt isolated, lonely and hurting,” she said.
A vegetable garden project is already running on the land, and there are plans for an orchard.
The next step, Mr Meinhold said, was to engage a planner to work through the process of obtaining council permits for the project.
“The purpose of today is to be here and get our idea out there; to raise awareness,” he said.
“We are at the beginning – what I am describing here is where we are heading,” he said.
Anyone who would like to know more about the Community Healthfulness project, can phone 0418 102 413.