International Helath Humanities Network Blog
Mutual Recovery - a new project
Monday January 14th saw the first meeting of the management team of an exciting new AHRC funded project. The project is called ‘Creative Practice as Mutual Recovery: Connecting Communities for Mental Health and Wellbeing’ and involves some innovative new initiatives to foster recovery through the arts and humanities. We’ve called it mutual recovery because there are many ways in which recovering from mental health problems is a collective process, where service users, professionals, facilitators, volunteers and carers often work together and derive collective benefits too. The project involves several initiatives, namely:
Making music for mental health – will explore three interconnected issues: (1) the extent to which music learning and performing provides a forum for mutual recovery among adult mental health service users, their carers, and musicians, (2) the characteristics of mutual recovery through music learning and performing, and (3) the underlying mechanisms of how this mutual recovery works. The work package involves two 20-week programmes of creative music learning and performing, facilitated by professional and student musicians and open to adult mental health service users and their carers.
Birth Shock - will investigate the role arts and humanities engagement might play in pre and antenatal care, and provision, especially where trauma, especially post-traumatic stress disorder is being experienced through bodily symptoms. This will involve mixed activities, combining the visual arts and visual anthropology with participant mothers, birth partners, obstetricians and midwives; case study using practical documentary film in conjunction with other art-making techniques.
People Talking: Digital Dialogues for Mutual Recovery - will develop for the first time a digital storytelling programme with a number of groups of mental health service users and health and social care personnel, to explore the value of digital storytelling as a process and practice within 'mutual recovery'.
Clay works for mutual recovery - will investigate to what extent creative clay therapy can provide a medium for ‘mutual recovery’ among adult mental health service users, carers, artists and health and social care personnel. It will compare lone and group sculpting within and between these communities, determine particular features of ‘mutual recovery’ through clay sculpting as a shared creative enterprise, identify benefits and dis-benefits of the shared activity and develop a visual archive of clay works.
Our central hypothesis is that creative practice, for example, in visual arts, music, storytelling or sculpture, could be a powerful tool for bringing together a diverse range of social actors and communities of practice in mental health, to establish and connect them in a mutual or reciprocal fashion to enhance mental health and well-being.
The project enjoys links with a variety of bodies at home and abroad that will facilitate its success. Within the UK, there is involvement from the Mental Health Foundation, the Institute of Mental Health, the Institute of Psychiatry, the Centre for Mental Health, the National Service Users Network and the Workers’ Educational Association. The organisers have also created an international platform with the US National Institute of Health / OppNet, Massachusetts General Hospital Department of Psychiatry and Shanghai Mental Health Centre.
The project officially kicks off in April, so watch this space for future developments.