Mayo Recovery College celebrates 10th anniversary

By Tom Gillespie

THE Mayo Recovery College began in 2013 - the first in Ireland at the time. The college is community facing and open for everyone with an interest in mental health and well-being.

This may be those with lived experience, their supporters/family members, mental health professionals and community organisations.

Based on the Castlebar campus of the Atlantic Technological University (ATU), the Mayo Recovery College has emerged as a significant social and educational innovation since its inception. Last year they were recipients of a Rehab Mayo People of the Year Award, as well as receiving the 2022 Inspiring Organisation Award and finalists in the 2021 Health Service Excellence Award.

The college's core staff - Donal Hoban, Karen McHale, Billy Clarke and Kevin Fenton - have been through their own and family member challenges with mental health.

Now part of their job is to courageously use that lived experience to support others to learn about different mental health and wellbeing topics, break down stigma and inspire hope.

This unique service aims to support, maintain and promote positive mental health in the community and to foster hopeful positive conversations about human distress and the challenges associated with poor mental health. Their mission is to advance personal recovery through vibrant adult education.

A 10th anniversary celebration night will be held in the ATU, St. Mary’s Hall, this Thursday (November 9) from 5 p.m. to 7.30 p.m., to which all present and past students, co-producers, people who work in the services and members of the public are invited.

Mr. Donal Hoban, director of Mayo Recovery College, told me: “The college started as a very basic idea that we would use adult education to support mental health recovery. Myself and a colleague approached a funding agency. At the time this was regarded as radical and counter cultural and very different. It took a bit of time to get traction but we did and in partnership with the ATU we were able to establish a college.

“The Recovery College is unique in so as far as it has applied theory and practice of adult learning to supporting mental health recovery.

“As the Recovery Colleges began to flourish and develop we were at the forefront here in Mayo to carry that torch for Recovery Colleges.

“What is unique about the college is the modular content where we have professional expertise in collaboration with lived experience. We have a curriculum and the language is very deliberately educational, not therapeutic.

“The Recovery College is an open forum and is available to any person in the community who wishes to avail of it. We also have a responsibility to make it available for those people who have more challenging, enduring mental illnesses - those would be the people who use the HSE services.

“We use a timetable very similar to what you see in further education for the structure of the academic year. This is important as we are trying to signal to people this is not therapy, it is education. It is not a special place for special people it is just a place that people come to.

“The Mayo Recovery College remains quite unique along with our sister college in Galway in so far as we are very much aligned and embedded with third-level education.”

Mr. Billy Clarke, recovery education facilitator at the Mayo Recovery College, said: “I stated attending the Mayo Recovery College in about 2016. At the time I was in recovery from by own mental health challenges, including addiction.

“One of the things I found in those early days of recovery was that there was not very many things in the community for people like me who were trying to get sober, trying to connect with other people who were in recovery. In Ireland the meeting place is the pub and that was a place I couldn’t go to. I was trying to connect with people who were in the same boat as me.

“I came across the Recovery College. I know it was running for a few years, but what really attracted me was there was one particular module they were doing specifically on addiction. I went to that module and like everyone I was nervous as I did not know what to expect, but when I went in I found exactly what I was looking for.

“I found people who were in recovery and had experience of both addiction and mental health challenges. They were just sharing their experiences, and not just sharing the experiences that had been through, but sharing their experiences of how they were living from day-to-day, how they were managing and how they were coping.”

He continued: “This was really helpful to me because literally hearing it from people’s own experience of how they were getting well. At the time I had gone back to education. I was doing a social care course in what was the GMIT at the time and one of the aspects of the course was you had to go on a work placement, which I did with the Recovery College, and I got to learn more about the Recovery College - the whole theory about the Recovery College is people coming together with lived experience and family members of people who are going through challenges, coming together and sharing those experiences with each other and sharing how to cope on a day-to-day basis.

“Then I was lucky enough to get employment with the Recovery College back in 2020. It has been an amazing journey and the difference for me is I had been to hospitals and different places and I had spoken to professionals and they were very helpful and I got help from loads of different areas, but I don’t think anything helped me more than actually sitting down with those with lived experience and learning what they did and bring that into my own life.”

Ms. Karen McHale, peer educator at the Recovery College, said: “I have my own experience of mental health challenges and addiction was also in my story, while also supporting a family member and in addiction. When I started working in the Recovery College it was the natural fit because of my lived experience and also my family experience. So I asked how can I be useful, as well as being useful sharing my experience and get paid for it.

“The difference in what we do with mainstream education and transformative learning and recovery education is that in our space we come away from desks, we come away from the classroom type setting - it is more discussion. We use the community living room space in ATU.

“Everyone that comes is a student and the beauty about that is that they can be studying absolutely anything. There is no stigma around ‘Oh, I am coming up to the Recovery College for my mental health or addiction’.

“We are under the HSE umbrella. We have a service level agreement with Mental Health Ireland and we are employed by Mental Health Ireland.”

Mr. Kevin Fenton, recovery education facility at the Mayo Recovery College, said: “We do have a very strong relationship with ATU. I am a product of that. A couple years ago I had my own mental health challenges. I was in a career that I was exhausted from. I took time out around Covid time. I reset my own life.

“I wanted to give my own lived experience to help others. Then I came across the course in ATU Mayo. I loved the education side of it and it had huge value for my own recovery. I shared learning within a classroom environment realising you are not on your own.

“You learn something new every day when someone comes in with something different and valuable. The relationship between the ATU and ourselves is something to be proud of.”

Mayo Recovery College is based at Westport Road, Castlebar. They can be contacted on (086) 0294901 or email recovery.educatormrc@hse.ie.