Positive Mental Attitude League
A vistit to Hackney FC
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At best, you might think football‘s social benefits are lower obesity levels and perennial banter for the conversationally challenged. 40 year-old Janette Hynes (right), however, has proved that football can work wonders in the treatment and convalescence of people with mental health issues. After astonishing success with her Positive Mental Attitude League (PMAL), she was awarded 2007 Social Entrepreneur of the Year.
London-based PMAL has 12 teams in two divisions. Each team trains twice a week for four hours, and has monthly matches. The players are all current and former ‘NHS mental health service users’, with conditions like obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Janette runs both leagues, and manages the Hackney team.
I visited Hackney’s training session on a brilliant Autumn day that made even East London vigorously beautiful. First I met Janette at Homerton University Hospital, where she is an occupation therapist. “When I was playing football for Fulham,” explained Janette, “I met many people with mental health problems. I liked them, and helping them fitted into my way of thinking.” Retiring from football, she trained as an occupational therapist and joined the NHS.
She was impressed by the psychological and physical beneficial of football for mental health patients in hospital, but appalled that nobody organised football for discharged patients, who would still benefit massively. She resolved to change that.
There was much resistance. “All mental health publicity is people just out of hospital stabbing someone,” says Janette, “which stigmatises all patients.” Mislead by headlines, authorities thought that mentally ill footballers would run amok if they lost. Under pressure from the formidable Janette, however, they buckled and she set up her league in 2005.
“In three years, there have been no fights,” claims Janette. “Football addresses it all – anger management, anxiety control...”
The benefits are legion. The most obvious is getting people out of the house. Janette and I walked from Homerton Hospital to 43 year-old schizophrenic Albert Dias’ flat. Lean and bouncy - he’s lost a stone and a half playing football - he was excited about training. Without it, he’d have spent the day alone, watching television.
Arriving at the ground, we meet 22 year-old Hayley White, Hackney’s only female player (left). She has OCD and social anxiety. “I come across quite well, but I’m screaming inside.” She explains, matter-of-factly.
“Did you play football at school?” I ask, wondering whether someone with mental health problems could make a school team.
“I played for Arsenal, Chelsea, and England Under 16s.” She replies.
The rest of the team gradually arrive. Simply getting their kit together and being somewhere on time teaches a level of self-management that endless therapy cannot, Janette tells me. Spirits are high, as is the standard of football. They mill around, chatting, joking, and doing ‘keepie-uppies’ as competently as footballers on soft drinks adverts. It’s easy to understand how Hackney has won the PMAL Cup every time (last season they scored 51 goals and let in two).
The exhausting-looking, professionally slick training session begins. I talk to 34 year-old captain Peter Smith (left), currently off-games through injury. In 2002 he was hospitalised when bipolar disorder triggered a breakdown. Back on his feet now, he’s just been hired as a Project Coordinator with the charity 4Sight. “PMAL was the catalyst for me,” he says. “I’d studied, but I never completed anything due to my illness. Now, through what I’ve learnt at PMAL, I can manage myself effectively enough to get at good job, and do it well.”
He sums up PMAL’s core benefit nicely: “Take someone out of society, stick them on their own in a flat, medicate them... anybody would be destroyed, let alone someone who’s already fragile. PMAL is about giving people the ability to be independent, but with support.”
The long-term nature of PMAL’s support is particularly beneficial. “The problem in mental health,” Peter continues, “is that good people move on. The programme you’re involved in stops, on the new person is no good. Here we have regular, constant, holistic treatment”. PMAL’s teams are funded by the Football Foundation Small Grants scheme. They are run by the players, not by the NHS, local council, or any body whose changing whims might shut them down. As long as the players want to play, funds allowing, the clubs will continue.
Although Janette is key (“she’s fantastic” says Peter), the brilliance of football as therapy is its collective synergy, as Peter explains: “We share problems. Chances are one of us will have experience and can help.”
PMAL creates a society bonded by more than football. They empathise with each other, tackling individual adversity together. Any relapses can be noticed and controlled before the back-to-hospital stage.
32 year-old player Julio Joseph is also off games, but he’s come along to watch. A schizophrenic, he was sent to a secure hospital for four years for aggrieved bodily harm in 1999. He’d hit his girlfriend, hated himself for it, and thought his life was over. Under Janette’s and PMAL’s guidance he’s cheered up, taken several refereeing exams, and now referees for the Amateur Football Combination – Europe’s largest amateur league.
Away from individual successes, Janette is hoping PMAL will spark more ‘awareness’ of mental health issues. She intends to extend PMAL nationwide, and into the 2012 Paralympics. ‘Awareness’ is often a fatuous buzzword, but here it has twofold resonance. First, Janette hopes to dilute the ‘care-in-the-community-stabber’ stigma. Secondly, she thinks increased understanding of mental health will mean that teenagers (which is when problems tend to strike) will self-diagnose, and not be embarrassed to seek help.
I left the training session uplifted by the hopeful confidence of the players, the warm camaraderie of the Hackney team, and Janette’s capable charisma. As I sauntered away, football noises in the background, beautiful east London all around, Janette’s words replayed in my mind: “What I’ve done with football is show them that their lives aren’t finished if they’ve got mental health problems.”
Neither PMAL nor the Hackney team have corporate sponsors. For sponsorship, or more info on PMAL see www.leaguewebsite.co.uk/pmafl/ or email janette.hynes@elcmht.nhs.uk
Copyright The Financial Times Ltd, photos Angus Watson
