Many of us don’t imagine though, that we may give birth to a child with severe learning disabilities, or that our teenager may want to kill herself or that we may lose our memory through dementia.
These experiences shatter our constructs of the life we thought we had and often catapult us into despair, a palpable sense of isolation, fear and loneliness. What I have learned is that we cannot be defined by our cultural ‘label’, and that first and foremost, we are people, not the ‘label’ or ‘diagnosis’.
I have worked for 30 years in nature with groups from all backgrounds. This includes special educational needs groups and other vulnerable groups in partnership with the National Health Service e.g. Families with children with severe learning difficulties, looked after children, young people with mental health difficulties and more recently people diagnosed with Dementia or having had an episode of psychosis. Hidden within all these terms are ordinary people, having non-ordinary experiences.
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