Mental Health is a part of us all, be it good, bad or indifferent. We recognise one in four of us will have some sort of an experience of significant negative mental health experience at some point in our lives.
We work with participants to discover a creative language which participants can use to explore the internal rules they operate under and the techniques they use to try and cope with difficulties.
We understand experiencing negative mental health can make us feel overwhelmed, the volume and strength of the emotions and intrusive thoughts we are experiencing can be challenging to manage. We believe working creatively allows participants to articulate and understand behaviours and more importantly can provide a framework with which to begin to change them.
We also specialise in using drama and arts techniques to work alongside psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health care workers on expressly therapeutic programmes. Drama and arts are used to encourage clients to address old problems with new approaches in a safe and controlled environment. So our focus in this field is much about working to promote the skills, communication, empathy, and problem solving, that can maintain positive mental health as much as working with people currently experiencing mental health difficulties.
We work across a wide range of settings, in hospitals, halfway houses, schools and through community and voluntary groups. Projects can be sometimes purely creative, a therapy in itself, or geared towards promoting rehabilitation skills in communication and confidence building.
Recent Projects
Mind Your Head, North Devon District Hospital Department of Psychiatry, 2019
The Movement Project – Ilfracombe, North Devon
Funded by the Peoples’ Health Lottery this project was developed in collaboration with the Ilfracombe Link Centre. We facilitated a weekly group bringing together Link Centre members and other people from the wider community to explore the relationship between our bodies, movement, and our mental health.
The group delivered their own participatory workshop for professionals and fellow service users as part of the North Devon Mental Health Day.
It’s enjoyable and you have a laugh. I miss it when I don’t come. It’s helped me come out of myself more…participant
It’s something to get up for, to look forward to. And it has helped me join a group, because for me, I don’t cope with groups of people, so it’s been a really big thing for me…participant
The Workplace Project – Bideford & Barnstaple Link Centres, North Devon 2013
This projet ran over a 6 month period working with men with aspergers and autism who were involved in local mental health services. This group, which, as one participant described, was ‘a group for people who don’t do groups’ explored with participants the idea of ‘work’. Work in its widest sense of meaningful activity. It looked at the many difficulties that participants experienced in both finding work, and even if they did so, the challenges the working environment presented to them in the light of their condition.
The drama and visual arts based sessions focussed on skills and self confidence development, and involved visits from representatives from the local Job Centre, and successful business people who also had aspergers.
Mind Your Head – North Devon District Hospital Department of Psychiatry – 2007 – 2008
A one day a week, 18 month Lankelly Chase Foundation funded research project working with the two psychiatric wards at North Devon District Hospital. We worked in the acute wards with a changeable population of participants.
The project ran on Fridays, as a boost before the weekend, a period that many often found most difficult to get through. During the day we offered participants the opportunity to engage in a range of creative activity. There was space for group work and individual working if participants needed to be on their own. Although the project worked arcoss art form we noticed good engagment with dance and movement.
For participants feeling really anxious is provided a release, for others who were feeling the physical side effects of heavy medication, or who had had suffered physical or sexual abuse, it enabled them to reconnect with their bodies in a positive way.
Another other key aspect to this project was working with participants and staff to create a monthly video magazine to showcase work created. Interviews with staff or doing tours of the unit that we filmed were used to introduce new admissions onto the wards in a non threatening way.
The project was also open to patients who had been discharged to keep coming back to by means of a way of continuity and so the process of recovery could be monitored.
The hospital report at the end of the project showed that Mind Your Head had overall reduced ‘Serious Incidents’ (violence, self harm, absconding) by 76% on the days it was in. Participants commented:
I have electroconvulsive therapy on a Friday morning and the group is very helpful in getting me functioning again
Fun, built my confidence. I was able to talk to other patients from my ward in this setting, which I hadn’t been able to do before
It has given me hope that I will be able to function when I finally go home