This article is an extract from the WIAMH Annual Review for 2013, published this week.
It seems inevitable that every few years voluntary organisations must reinvent themselves, supposedly to adjust to changing circumstances. This is odd, because in our case at least, the circumstances which change are not our main focus. Individuals’ states of health or illness may come and go, but the existence of mental illness, like other states of health, has been a constant factor since people started living long enough to avoid being someone else’s dinner.
What changes is organisational fashion and legal context, and for these reasons, WIAMH is now at the end of its third incarnation, as a charitable company, and the committee are now decided that we should reform as a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (SCIO). This is not entirely a new idea – indeed, questions about the advantages of Company status have been around since our incorporation. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the only constant factor in our history has been working out the next change. But I say again: The real constant factor is the states of ill health we seek to alleviate.
