The estates
Kingsheath, Bellinge, Blackthorn, Thorplands. From my early teens, a house full of foster children, over a hundred of them through the years.
Matthew Bushell
Writer, peer and therapeutic coach
In Northampton, on UK time.
Northampton · England
My birth certificate says Mathew, with one t. My passport says Matthew, with two. No one in my family knows how the second t appeared. I found out in 2015, working at the county archives, when I held the original register in my hands and read what a government clerk had written beside my name.
Spelling of Mathew with one ‘T’ confirmed by both parents.In the margin. Original ink.
I kept looking. In the archives in Kent I found Stephen Bushell Pay, my third great-grandfather. When he enlisted in the British Army, some 150 years ago, he dropped Pay and went by Bushell. By 1880 he was in South Africa, in the First Boer War. Five generations of my forefathers served in the armed forces. At seventeen and a half, in the Royal Signals, I became the sixth.
Matthew means gift. A bushel is the basket in his gospel, the one you’re told not to hide your light under.
In September 2025 I went to South Africa too. At Love Books in Johannesburg I queued to ask the historian Hlonipha Mokoena to sign her book, The Nightwatchman. I asked her to write it to the unknown, un-uniformed man. She looked at me, and wrote in isiZulu, and then she read it back to me in English.
The soldier who does not know himself, who does not have his own house.
Inscribed by Hlonipha Mokoena, Tuesday 9 September 2025
This is the house.
Come in.
I live with bipolar. The clinic calls it bipolar disorder. On my back is a dragon, and on the inside of my left arm a phoenix, inked over two days in Northampton in 2013. The dragon is mania. The phoenix is depression. For years I was told they were at war. Look closely and his wing is sheltering her.
I live with both of them within me, mania and depression, each in the other. For a long time I felt I wasn’t whole, as if something in me was broken. I don’t see it that way now. I’m neither broken nor fixed, and I accept them both. That’s why I use the word wholeless. People hear it as wholeness, or as something missing, and it’s neither. It’s -less as in boundless. Mania and depression are places I pass through. There’s no edge where I stop being me, and nowhere to send either of them.
My work comes out of my lived experience of bipolar, complex PTSD and substance use. Peer support gave me belonging. Therapeutic coaching gave me a way of working. Emotional fitness gave me something to do with a feeling, every day. Writing gets me through the night. None of it happened alone.
Five places
Everything I do lives somewhere in these. I learned to see them this way at 5th Place.
Home
Where I come from, and who I come home to.
The names
Bushell and Pay. Mathew and Matthew. Six generations in the armed forces, and what that left me to work out.
Family
Married, father of two daughters, and walked most days by Haven, my Black Dalmador.
The street
A wide street in Northampton. More sky than bricks. You can watch the sun come up over the trees on the far side of the valley.
Work
What I do with people, and how I got here.
Therapeutic coaching
One to one since 2022, with people living with bipolar. Trained by Frances Masters in the Fusion model.
Emotional fitness
UK and Europe representative for 5th Place, taking Shape of Emotion to organisations, schools and communities.
Peer training
Recovery College Peer Trainer with Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, where I run Living with Bipolar. Courses made by the people who have used the services.
Speaking
From the International Society for Bipolar Disorders in Japan to two hundred young students, asking what if nothing is wrong with you.
Community
Recovery is something we do with each other.
Peer support
More a relationship than a service. Trained in Intentional Peer Support and ImROC, with my own Wellness Recovery Action Plan.
Recovery communities
LERO Coordinator with The Forward Trust, and a member and volunteer of Community Recovery, a distinct, lived-experience-led organisation with its own leaders.
Expert by Experience
Co-production with West and North Northamptonshire Councils, shaping services with the people who use them.
Lived Experience Council
Working with researchers and clinicians around the world, through the International Society for Bipolar Disorders.
Cyberspace
People can be met here too, when the tools let them.
Digital social innovation
Twenty-six years of taking a technology into a room of people and making it work for the people in the room.
David Pinto and Pscale
David invented Pscale, and I’ve worked with him since 2010. It holds an open commons where people keep their own account in their own words. He calls me the pilot.
Apps and tools
Sundial on my phone. Work for Community Recovery. Digital tools for coaching clients, charities and communities.
In the Zone
UK Ambassador for shared care in bipolar: the person, the people who love them and their clinicians, in it with each other.
The fifth place
All of it, each in the other, being who we are.
Writing for therapeutic purposes
A creative writing degree, the arts and health movement, and a long belief that we recover by restorying.
Presence in Action
A practitioner of Louie Gardiner’s practice, where noticing facts, feelings, fictions and purpose changes what happens next.
Natural Inclusion
Alan Rayner’s way of reasoning, and fourteen years of his letters.
Wholeless
The word I’ve been working with, -less as in boundless.
At the moment
- LERO Coordinator The Forward Trust, North Northamptonshire
- Recovery College Peer Trainer Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
- Lived Experience Council International Society for Bipolar Disorders
- Expert by Experience West and North Northamptonshire Councils
- Therapeutic Coach with 5th Place, and its UK and Europe representative
- Peer support Intentional Peer Support and ImROC
- Presence in Action practitioner
- Naturally inclusive cultures with Occurrity
- Digital social innovation apps and tools for different people, and Pscale with David Pinto
- UK Ambassador In the Zone
- Writing Wholeless Nights, in the dark hours
Writing
It’s 4:16am. His heart is racing, the dream is already fading, and the only thing to do is write.
Wholeless Nights: Bipolar & the included middle, by Mathew Pay. Twenty-seven watches. Nights spent awake, restorying old memories so they survive. A book that builds a house and calls it home.
Say hello
Coaching, speaking, training, co-production, or a conversation. Tell me what you hope for, and we’ll start there.