Mutual Recovery for Mental Health and Wellbeing through Creative Practice

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This project development grant is focussed upon the creation of a substantial consortia proposal in the area of mutual recovery through creative practice in a mental health context. By mutual recovery we refer to the potentials for variously connected communities of services users, health professionals and informal carers to facilitate each other's well being - in this case in a mental health context. By creative practice we are refer to activities such as painting, performance and story telling. Thus we are interested in interrogating how such creative practice, and the sharing of creative practice output and experiences in the physical world and via digital media, might be helpful (or not) in processes of mutual recovery. In lay terms, we are interested in, for example, how (and if) the creation, sharing and discussion of a creative output (such as a painting) might improve various people's health and wellbeing.Our project rests within a context of a continuing and growing burden of mental distress, where rather than viewing recovery as a cure or eradication of problems, it recognises the possibility of recovering a meaningful and more resilient life with or without ongoing symptoms or disabilities. At the same time, there are mounting concerns about whether mental health service staff themselves, and the great body of informal carers in the UK (6-7m) need to be 'recovered' and develop resilience respectively in increasingly threatening, production-line organisations or isolating and under-supported environments, which research suggests promote compassion depletion. Further, with respect to creative practice, to date, via the therapeutic logic of healthcare, the service user has been positioned solely as the beneficiary of professional and informal carer contributions in creating opportunities for this rather than having creative capacity themselves. Our research proposal offers a radical shift in vision in mental health care - that the reciprocal sharing of creative practice, in the physical world and via digital media, could transform how professionals, informal carers and service users work together and take new opportunities to build egalitarian, appreciative and substantively connected communities - resilient communities of mutual hope, compassion and solidarity.