Glenn Jarvis

A lot of the NDIS providers are still a little bit risk adverse, I find.

Yeah, working for the smaller service, they're just a little bit more nimble and flexible, which I think NGOs were always meant to be before they become a bit huge sometimes and a bit more risk averse.

Yeah, when I was a consumer advocate about 10 years ago, a local Catholic priest and some of his parishioners came up with the idea that they wanted to build a home in Queanbeyan for people living with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses, just somewhere where they wouldn't be alone or hungry or cold.

which was happening a lot and probably still happening for people with schizophrenia, people struggling to get by on welfare.

So they did.

There was a bit of resistance to it, to the idea initially in various quarters, but they established this place and it's just going fantastically now.

What do people often get wrong about schizophrenia?

Yeah.

I think the perception of people with schizophrenia is that we're a scary bunch of people.

I mean, when you're unwell, you can do and say things are a bit wacky and a bit scary, but...

When people receive treatment and are stabilised, people with schizophrenia are probably some of the nicest, most humble people you can meet.

And they'd give you the shirt off their back if they could to help you out if you're going through tough times with the same circumstances.

I think that's a much better idea than what happens in our society.

It's a lot of blame and shame that tends to go with having a diagnosis like schizophrenia.

With us, I think that approach sounds a lot better.

Well I don't look back on it a lot these days.

Some of what happened to me was pretty traumatic so I went and had some treatment called EMDR which is for post-traumatic stress disorder and I had a lot of the memories I had from back then reprocessed and yeah I try not to think about it but

Yeah, the thought of this interview and talking about that has been making me think about it a bit recently.

It's like that novel that begins, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, because at Enron, some of the stuff I used to do, the travel and the nights out and things like that, it was, like, fantastic.

It was wonderful working there.