Jo Poole is the new Lived Experience Independent Co-Chair of the Open Mental Health Voluntary, Community, Faith and Social Enterprise alliance.
Jo Poole was born into a Somerset farming family and had an early introduction to the challenges of mental illness. “My mum and dad really struggled with their mental health when I was growing up. Life was quite stressful, and I was always very afraid of mental illness,” she reflects.
Jo’s first personal experience of mental illness came at 17 and marked the beginning of a 21-year battle. A subsequent crisis at 19 led to her hospitalisation, a terrifying but necessary step on her path to recovery. “Looking back on it now, that was what I needed,” she said, acknowledging the importance of that intervention. “But I was thrown into a system that I was afraid of.” During this period, she experienced Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) and began lithium treatment, which significantly aided her recovery.
Jo’s involvement with Open Mental Health as an Expert by Experience Leader was a turning point, not just in her recovery but in her sense of purpose. She values the unity and understanding encouraged by OMH, “What Open Mental Health has done is bring us closer together,” Jo explains. “The professionals and people with lived experience have found that we’re not so different. We’re all people. We have our weaknesses and strengths.”
Jo says, “We’re all experts by experience in life, we’re all experts in our own experience, but an Expert by Experience Leader in Open Mental Health is someone who’s had their own struggle with mental illness and reached a point in their life where they’d like to use that experience to help other people and help the mental health system.”
Through her role as an Expert by Experience Leader, she emphasises the importance of listening and learning from those who use the mental health system, saying, “Open Mental Health looked at the people using the services and said, let’s do the really courageous thing and listen.”
Reflecting on her personal and professional life, Jo shares the challenges her mental health struggles have brought, “I wasn’t able to have a career. Because of my mental health, I wasn’t able to reach many of my dreams. When I had my children, I needed so much help to raise them because I was struggling with such severe illness.” Yet, her current wellbeing and involvement in OMH have given her a renewed sense of self-confidence. “There’s no comparison to where I was and where I am now.”
Jo says of her work as an Expert by Experience Leader, “It opens up a world that is often shut to people with mental illness, which is the world of work. The world of community and socialising and connection. All of those things. You might think going to an Open Mental Health board meeting is boring, but actually, it’s not. It means something when you haven’t been able to have a career, and you haven’t had a voice for so long because of what’s been going on in your mind, and suddenly people are taking you seriously and asking you, well, what do you think?'”
Jo brings a lifetime of hard-won experience to her new role as the Independent Co-Chair of the OMH VCFSE alliance. Her journey through the trials of mental illness to become a leader making a tangible difference in the mental health community demonstrates the power of lived experience.