By STEVE GRAY
IF you want proof that volunteering is good for you, just ask Christine Stammers.
For Christine, a stint volunteering after the floods of 2010 and 2011 was the catalyst that brought her back from a lifetime of mental illness and self-harm.
“It led to paid work, I’ve written a book, it’s been fantastic,” she said.
“Volunteering helped me see my skills and abilities and my self-worth again and gave me the self-confidence to say I can get back into life.”
Christine said she had suffered mental illness from age eight, had her first psychotic episode at 13 years and had no help until she was 30.
She met Bette Bonney after a severe episode caused by a bad reaction between different medications she was prescribed.
“I had lost the ability to think of the most basic things like how to make a cup of tea,” she said.
A tenacious woman, Christine chose to “retrain her brain” rather than surrender to the disease.
When the floods came she decided to help because “it was just shovelling s**t”.
“That’s what led me to meet Bette, and her body language was just so welcoming. The shutters didn’t go down on her face when I said I had a problem.
“Sometimes when you tell people you have a mental health issue the shutters just go down.”
Christine said helping out at data entry led her to see she still had worth and value as a person.
Having been defined by her “craziness” since she was teenager, volunteering had taught her she could be defined by her skills and value to others.
It was a real turning point.
Christine has written a book My Mum is Amazing in which she used language her teenage daughter could understand, unlike so many other books on mental illness which are heavy with technical language and daunting in their medical complexity.
She is now an accredited counsellor, making a living and running courses for others debilitated by mental illness.
And the remarkable journey back all began with a simple decision to volunteer.
