How Does It Work?
What People Say
“I have just completed six weeks of ‘Exploring Sound’ and we all had such a good time. We met in our group as strangers and parted as friends.”
“It gave me a focus, made me feel I belong. You forget your own trouble.”
“I feel better and that is important, not just to me but to my family it’s important. My daughters have said how it’s doing me good, and my spirits have risen a bit.”
“It’s self-confidence, I think. The great thing … is that it’s very driven by yourself. It’s made me more cheerful, more positive, I’m feeling braver.”
“It opens your mind to what you can do, what is there to do, if there’s somebody who understands and can help you achieve it.”
“I wanted to be left in peace but I find how much better it is to meet other people, do other things and get out of my room.”
“It accelerated my recovery. I don’t get agitated about things. I think I’m much more able to sort loads and loads of different things.”
“It’s opened up a new area of life. I can go out and meet people now. I was too much looking into myself before. Now I’m looking more outward.”
“It makes you feel a bit more, well, yes, somebody cares. It’s things like that give people a bit of purpose, a bit of encouragement. That’s what you need.”
“People just get more confident every week. It probably does them a lot of good. Does me good really, there’s no doubt about that.”
“I try not to think about my health really. If you can get on with something, then you feel better. It takes your mind off it.”
“Two months ago I didn't have the confidence to answer the phone. Now I've been starting to do some work as a volunteer. People don't have the confidence to do a lot of things, it wanes. What I'm doing now, it's nearly like it's a strange world.”
“Well, if people are enjoying their life a bit better they are more inclined to stay in their own home longer. So prevention is better than cure. My argument would be that the sort of thing Upstream are doing is something that needs to be expanded.”
“I like it when I can help other people. There was that little old lady that I walked home. Well, I suppose the Tai Chi was a bit like that. It made me feel useful again.”
“Well I'm not old, no, it's only other people that get old. They say, “You're 88”, well, what's 88? It's only a number isn't it?”
What the mentors say
“As a mentor, I think that hope is a very important ingredient. We need to sustain hope in our participants.”
“People put up barriers – transport, time, routines that are set in stone, mobility. People don’t like being a problem to anyone. It takes time to reassure people and to show them how we can get round these problems. People have to trust us that we are meeting them on equal terms.”
“The thing that we can attempt to do is to give people back their independence, whereas other agencies may, by the way they are structured, encourage dependence. We can play a vital role in assisting people towards greater confidence, ideas of value and self-worth, but sustainability is the key.”
“Sometimes a relatively short spell of creativity may give people enough confidence and delight in their achievements to produce a lasting result in raising their self-esteem and to greatly affect their quality of life.”
“People seem to warm to a small group, with mutual ‘sharing and daring’ of creative skills, while developing a social network. They are then more interested in taking responsibility for the group themselves.”
“In some ways I could have been a ‘client’ myself. When I retired, we moved 200 miles from where we had lived for 30 years. I felt isolated, insecure, cut off. My involvement as a mentor has helped me feel more settled, more secure, has encouraged me with a greater sense of belonging to where I am now, and given me the opportunity to use my skills and to feel of value.”
“There was a lonely lady who joined us and just sat for two sessions. “I can’t draw, I can’t read, I can’t write, I don’t like painting, I can’t do that, I don’t like crayons.” Now she’s fine. Other people you can see just get more confident every week.”
“He said the change in his aunt, who has been attending the print-making group, had been very noticeable. She herself had arranged to move to the residential home when she could no longer cope at home and she had expected to deteriorate at that point. However, since attending (the mentored activities), she had become chatty and alert and enthusiastically told people about what she was doing and showed them some of the work she was producing.”
“It has been a real joy for me to see him come to life again… He seems to attribute a lot of the latest improvement to the mentor intervention… He has changed from someone who went out very little, found it extremely difficult to phone people and said that even the simplest of social interaction was very hard for him. Now he never seems to be in! … Driving lessons, voluntary work, computer course, all this in spite of depressing news about his lung condition. “I want to enjoy whatever time I’ve got left, not spend it feeling the way I have been over the last few years.”
What the health professionals say
“I think the mentors have been very good … they spend a lot of time trying to find out what would motivate the individual and trying to accommodate that. I do believe that (mentoring) is a useful thing and I’m sure the patients benefit from it without any doubt at all.”
“One lady said, “I never go out except to the shops because all my friends are dead, my husband’s dead, I don’t have any children.” I got Upstream involved … she goes to the art group or local history group … she’s made friends and she’s a new woman. She’s not depressed and withdrawn as she was. She’s got confidence and I think that’s terrific. She’s got a brighter step. It’s opened up new horizons for her and made her life better.”
“It gives them something to think about… It’s totally transformed their lives.”
“In terms of things like blood pressure and heart disease and all those ageing conditions, it’s not going to make a huge influence, but it’s the mental state that’s important. If you are happy in yourself then everything else is incidental. You can cope. Very often in elderly people if you give them anti-depressants it’s not the answer and they can cause confusion and drowsiness and falls and things like that. Because communities and families have broken down, elderly people do need these structured interventions to get them together because they don’t have confidence.”
“One chap who had a very difficult bereavement had quite a lot of support but was really struggling. We referred him to Upstream and he got on well with one of the mentors. He would say without a doubt that is the one thing that put him back on the rails. And from a health point of view he was not looking after himself. He was diabetic, he wasn’t monitoring things, everything was chaotic, and he’s now back on line. If you asked him he would say, “Yes, it’s Upstream that’s done it.” And he’s probably right.’ It was something he could sustain himself at home.”
“So often what happens is that [elderly] people lose their partner and they lose confidence. They’re used to going out as a couple and they just can’t face going out alone. You need a push, someone to encourage you. The mentors are good because they go in gently, they build up confidence. That’s so important because loneliness and isolation in old age is dreadful and it just gets worse and worse and worse.”
“Often when you’re struggling to some extent and you’re thinking, “This person’s lot isn’t very good, how can I improve it?” And you’ve got the ‘medical things’ under control but that isn’t making the life of that person very enjoyable … and if there isn’t [a network] or they don’t use it maybe Upstream can fill that gap.”
“The feedback we get from the family is very positive. They see changes. They say he seems brighter. Benefits that come from interacting and getting out of yourself, I think. One of the son’s, he’s very complimentary, which means that the family are also happier, more at ease.”
