This symposium was held at the JSWEC conference held at Strathclyde University on 15-16 June 2023
Symposium title
Restorative approaches to mental health system development.
Abstract
The neoliberal retreat from service provision has resulted in increasing levels of psychiatric neglect, as well as abuse in services, highlighted by recent public inquiries and media exposes. This has, inadvertently, opened up spaces for grassroots activists to begin to think about, and engage in, restorative-type practices. Such practices aim to bring together service users, survivors and refusers of services, with the staff who work/ed in them, to begin the work of healing the hurtful effects of experiences in the system.
Restorative approaches necessitate the creation of new spaces for conversations, listening and dialogue, outside the parameters of the current system.
In this workshop/symposium we outline four such initiatives. Operating on different timescales and in different kinds of spaces, all of them – through enabling people’s voices to be heard in the context of respectful listening – begin to bridge towards constructive alliances between workers, service users and survivors. They also all acknowledge that the categories or survivor and worker may sometimes overlap and that workers too may be damaged by systems, as well as the individuals receiving services.
• Critical and Creative Approaches to Mental Health Practice (CCrAMHP) is a mental health discussion group that has been meeting since 2011 in Lancaster. We introduct t
• Asylum magazine is a radical mental health magazine established in 1986 as the magazine for democratic psychiatry
• MadZines research is a three year, Wellcome funded, project based at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston.
• Hope in the Heart, based in Plymouth, enables people with lived experience of mental health services to communicate with service-providers, leaders and society through art and creativity.
Prevailing and historical harms are a profound impediment to the developing alliances between service users, survivors and social workers. This symposium will provide an opportunity to consider the implications of restorative approaches for social work education and practice1. Being the whole of you, seeing the whole of them: Critical and Creative Approaches to Mental Health Practice (CCrAMHP). Christina Cheney
This presentation is a contribution to the symposium: Restorative approaches and mental health system development: implications for social work. It will introduce the work of CCrAMHP, outline what it has in common with other restorative approaches and indicatehow it it is contributing to the development of mental health services.
“I’m starting to wish that I had never read a book!” Having recently qualified as a social worker, and started my first job, I found that much of my reading about social perspectives on mental health was difficult to apply in practice. It didn’t fit with the dominant ethos in mental health services. That email, sent in 2011, triggered the idea for what is now Critical and Creative Approaches to Mental Health Practice (CCrAMHP).
CCrAMHP is a group for all who are passionate about sustaining creative and critical practice in mental health, in situations that can feel constrained (hence our group name!). Meetings are open to service user/survivors, carers, mental health practitioners, students, educators, researchers and others with an interest in engaging in discussion and debate, reciprocal learning and support. Central to CCrAMHP’s ethos is that we each attend as an individual, ‘bringing the whole of us’, and not as a representative of a particular profession, group or organisation.
Through reading together, viewing films and getting into conversation we share critical and creative ideas and develop strategies for putting them into practice. .
2. Asylum, the Radical Mental Health Magazine and the Politics of Ambivalence. Hel Spandler.
This presentation is a contribution to the symposium: Restorative approaches and mental health system development: implications for social work. In the spring of 1986 Asylum, costing 50p but “Free to Inmates”, was launched. It continues as a forum for free debate, open to anyone with an interest in madness and distress. Asylum welcomes contributions from, and builds alliances between, service users or ex-users (or survivors), carers, and frontline mental health workers and students. Contributions can be anonymous.
This presentation will introduce the work of the magazine. It will show how – as a print-based publication, and one that acknowledges and explores the politics of ambivalence – Asylum complements other spaces for debate, such as those on social media.
The presentation will locate Asylum in relation to the emerging field of Mad Studies and recent research initiatives such as the Crafting Contetion project. It will show too how Asylum has been working in partnership with other related initiatives such as Critical and Creative Approaches to Mental Health Practice (CCrAMHP) and the Community for Holistic, Accessible, Rights Based Mental Health (CHARM) group in Greater Manchester, which campaign for more humane mental health services.
3. Crafting contention about mental health: MadZines as’ restorative objects’. Jill Anderson
This presentation is a contribution to the Symposium: Restorative approaches and mental health system development: implications for social work. It will introduce zines and the work of the ‘Crafting Contention’ (aka Madzines research) project. It will point to the value of zines, as ‘restorative objects’, in developing and enhancing mental health knowledge and practice.
Zines are not easy to define. They have been described as ‘noncommercial, nonprofessional, small-circulation magazines which their creators produce, publish and distribute by themselves’ (Duncombe, 2008).
Because they are often created, circulated and read by people who feel disaffected from mainstream society, zines can be a rich source of grassroots knowledge about marginalised experiences, conditions and identities. A zine can be about anything but there is a rich seam of health – including mental health – related zines.
Funded by Wellcome, and based at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, we have over the past three years – been identifying, analysing and co-producing a diverse range of what we collectively refer to as MadZines.
We have been exploring the potential of MadZines to challenge prevailing psychological, psychiatric and medical understandings, diagnoses and treatments. To that end, we have been working with groups and individuals, both in community settings and in higher
education institutions.
We are particularly interested in the idea of MadZines as restorative objects, with the power to help to broker dialogue and reconciliation between mental health service users/survivors and people working in the mental health system, across professions and at all levels.
This presentation will be of interest to social work practitioners and students who are interested in creative and/or restorative practices in mental health. It will be of interest too to social work educators and students who would like to explore approaches to zine pedagogy.
4. Messages from the HeART: reconciliation through intentional creative communication. Tam Hart
This presentation is a contribution to the Symposium – Restorative approaches and mental health system development: implications for social work. It will introduce Messages from the HeART – a project of Hope in the HeART CIC – and show how it has been encouraging co-production and reconciliation between service-providers and experts by experience.
Relational practice involves prioritising relationships over systems. While those of us who are or have been service-users may have encountered some excellent, supportive services, we can often feel that providers – including social workers – fail to relate to us human-to-human, in a spirit of compassion and equity.
People who live through challenging times often emerge with a message that is asking to be communicated. Creativity can be an ideal channel for such communication which can aid our own personal development and healing. It can also inspire and inform service-providers, policy-makers, commissioners and leaders. Through bridging the divide between people providing and on the receiving end of services, and acknowledging harm, creative approaches can change the way in which services – including social work services – respond to others in need.
Messages from the HeART has provided a platform to address some of the issues faced by people with lived experience of mental ill-health and promote relational change, reconciliation and co-production in an innovative, interactive and creative way. The presentation will draw out the significance of this work.
This contribution will be of interest to social work practitioners with an interest in exploring restorative practices. It was also be of interest to social work educators (including service user and survivor educators) who, through the integration of lived experience and creative approaches, seek to enhance student learning.
