Story of an END Involvement Worker - Ivan Jarunek

Ivan Jarunek has been an Involvement Worker with Time to Change's Education Not Discrimination project for around a year. He tells us about his work with the project, which provides anti-stigma training to medical students, trainee teachers, and senior teaching staff.

“I’ve been a service user since 1996.  When I heard about the opportunity with END, I saw it as a chance to put to good use my experience and the knowledge I’ve developed around mental health. It was the first job I’d applied for in several years, and I was delighted to be successful and be able to participate.

My work involves talking to third-year medical students about my own
experiences, and also feeding back on role-play sessions: as part of the training, actors play the parts of a service user and carer, and the students interview them as if it were a consultation. I observe this and give feedback on the way the students interact with the service user and carer. I can use my own experience to say what behaviours are helpful, and what
is less helpful.

Recently for example I was in Nottingham and presented my story to about 90 medical students – I told them about my journey through the health system and how I’ve come to be able to do this job. I talked about how my mental illness developed, how it has affected me, and how it has affected my relationships with my family and friends.

I believe that service users are a valuable resource in projects like this, because of our personal experiences, and the fact that we have regular interactions with professionals like psychiatrists and GPs. We are able to pass on these experiences to the next generation of doctors.

We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive response to the training. On a personal level, a student came up to me in Nottingham the other day and said that she found it really interesting to see how mental health really affects people and how important the relationship between the service user and doctor is. I find some of the personal responses I get quite moving. Yesterday several other students came up and thanked me for
the presentation so I felt I’d done something useful."