I was born in Stoke-on-Trent, in the West Midlands. I can’t say I did particularly well at school — to be honest, I pretty much hated it.
I joined the Army in 1992. Spent twelve years there — the best of my life.
After leaving the army, I started a career in social care. I began as a social work assistant in a child protection team, then qualified as a social worker. From there I worked for the NSPCC, then the Prison Service, and finally found my calling within mental health services.
I joined mental health services in 2015, mainly working in crisis services — access teams, home treatment teams, and liaison psychiatry. What I quickly started to realise was that at least 40% of the people we were seeing at the time were struggling with substance use — alcohol, cocaine, heroin, and so on. What I soon came to realise was that the mental health system purposely ostracised and discriminated against people who use substances. The design simply didn’t allow them to get support. To be frank, I was horrified at how people who use substances were treated by mental health services. That led me to start looking at doing a PhD in 2018.
Around the same time I found myself working in a mental health crisis team — specifically a heroin treatment team. I have to say it was probably the best job I’ve ever had. We were able to offer a genuinely bespoke service to the people who needed support, and we had a phenomenal team. I also found my place in academia during this period, on the social work degree — teaching about mental health, substance use, and the different elements social workers come up against in practice.
The PhD changed the way I thought — not just about mental health and addiction, but about society as a whole. I’d come from a very scientific view of the world. I loved neuroscience and biology. I loved how quickly and elegantly they could seem to explain mental health and substance use. What I came to realise within the first couple of years of the PhD was that we actually live in a very complex and hateful world — and that substances should be seen as a given. We all reach for some kind of substance to help us cope, if not to survive.
It was then that I really started to see the healthcare and social care system for what it is — designed on the neoliberal ideology of competition, privatisation, and individualism. For me this was devastating: knowing that there is an underlying ideology shaping practice that we don’t even name, let alone address. Yes, we talk about it in academia, but that never reaches the ground. It never reaches the fieldwork. We are trapped within systems we have no name for.
My work now is centred on identifying and naming what’s wrong with our systems. The starting point for me will always be the neoliberal ideology of individualism. I often come back to Margaret Thatcher’s speech where she said “there’s no such thing as society”. In essence, she destroyed this country by saying that.
I’m now very privileged to be a Senior Lecturer and Programme Lead for the social work degree at Liverpool Hope University, which has given me an incredible amount of resources to continue my research, and I’m incredibly grateful for that. My research now focuses on systems and what substances mean and do for people. My PhD was the starting point. The next point was the book. And in future, I see a lot more writing to be done.