Network Planning - Share Your Thoughts! by Mental Health and Social Justice Network

Possible collective reading of Stella Do Patrocínio's work?

mhsjnetwork — 2025-11-17 16:43:02 UTC

Inviate a delegation from Entrar Afuera collective (Barcelona) to enter an exchange on their creative work and community project.

mhsjnetwork — 2025-11-17 17:45:12 UTC

"Mad Labs"

2025-11-17 17:56:13 UTC

A series of labs offering a space to explore/workshop various ways of articulating, narrating, expressing, experiences of mental distress and the institutions/infrastructures that define/shape/contain/detain/sometimes care for us. Inviting writers/authors and also workshops around different themes and modes be they collective writing, fabulation, auto-fiction, testimony ??? Pain, Suffering, Madness, The Institution, Abolition - ideas welcome! In conjunction with SUBTEXTS - creative writing collective based at QMUL

I'm thinking about putting together a musical about the mental health system (especially, but not limited to inpatient care)?

2025-11-17 23:05:48 UTC

I often hear that it's difficult to describe what mental healthcare is like, and both staff and patients experience not being believed. Part of the problem of articulating the system is how absurd it can be, so I started to think that maybe this is something that could be captured in a musical, and that maybe by depicting the ridiculousness of the system (eg bureaucracy and blame culture) and laughing at it we can take back some power and create a space for change out of satire rather than blame. It'd be great to have a workshop where we could share experiences of the mental health system and work towards creating a storyline - and at the same time be thinking about the 'meta' of what we're doing - such as the effects of different creative modes, how systemic change happens, the role of affect and humour in change, the intended or unintended effects of storylines, and ethical issues such as who makes final decisions about the story/script and how to 'joke' about something that can be so traumatic.

Other ways to care: mass complaints, as complaints are very individualised and it splits power of survivors

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 19:21:05 UTC

other ways to care: post-psychosis care, people are currently written off for life. post-hospitalisation is th edanger period and there is 11k deaths worldwide a year in that 3 month period. all preventative. 117 aftercare to ease back into community but it doesn't exist due to service cuts/austerity

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 19:25:55 UTC

other ways to care: manifesto of demands from "survivors" of "care" to bring into policy/political/ICBs/ombudsman spaces

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 19:27:27 UTC

other ways to care: there are blueprints for campaigns of policy and contract change. petitions

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 19:34:11 UTC

other ways to care: bring out of neoliberalist individualist MH perspective and into community again.. how to contact other "service users"??

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 19:35:12 UTC

other ways to care: can't just be service users/survivors... needs to be propped up by everyone - changing public perceptions

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 19:40:15 UTC

other ways to care: open dialogue?? how the inpatient system works in Finland in relation to open dialogue

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 19:59:04 UTC

other ways to care: if there were the conditions to have this be possible then it'd happen... all the other societal issues wrapped around mh

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 20:01:36 UTC

other ways to care: volutneers in the NHS omehow integrate them nationally (this is what is the idea now in the NHS) - they have less to lose so they could be a good voice nationally

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 20:04:39 UTC

other ways to care: separate from the language and the dfferent forms of appropriation that the NHS encourages and that's why it's important to have these spaces to unlearn and challenge

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 20:06:32 UTC

other ways to care: infiltrators and disruptors - bootcamp for immunity to institutionalisation for staff/professional

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 20:08:30 UTC

other ways to care: outside of institutions to make institutions obsolete

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 20:09:41 UTC

Queer Encounters - Pride Event - Freud Museum

2025-11-21 20:10:05 UTC

Harriet M - possible colla on event in june, the stories/narratives p/a deploy vs those of 'patients' ..ripping up the archive

other ways to care: open dialogue is unique to Finnish context, how can we think imaginatively without state support within networks in a way that maintains holding and containment

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 20:10:33 UTC

Experience Sharing/Radio workshop -

2025-11-21 20:11:15 UTC

with survivors (qu how reach people in hosp)

other ways to care: in OR against the state- necessity of the scale to really challenge power structures....

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 20:11:17 UTC

other ways to care: staff within institutions arer so marginalised themselves, oppressed, first gen migrants, survival, lack of training, power relations within that are messed up but at same time... what can we do to support them as workers - unionisation

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 20:12:10 UTC

other ways to care: different ways of understanding incidents... public shaming, coroners courts, punitive shaming system

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 20:17:12 UTC

other ways to care: in the 'training care' - compassionate human care and incidents have happened and they've gone to coroners court and explained their human process and it has worked... link to storytelling?

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 20:19:44 UTC

other ways to care: lower level staff physically absorb the violence of the system but they also do the most radical things, closed ward envirnment creates risk and they should be involved in any re-education away from institutionalisation

hannahbeelawless — 2025-11-21 20:21:03 UTC

users resistance/movement

2025-11-21 20:24:39 UTC

the newspaper and other materials patients developed,

Ripping up the psychoanalytic archive: zine making at the Freud Museum

harrietmossop — 2025-11-21 20:30:18 UTC

A creative event at the Freud Museum, taking difficult historic psychoanalytic writing, ripping it up, using it as raw material for zine making, to see what we make of it and transform historic texts into our own MAD, queer stories.

The event would take place in June 2026 in collaboration with the Queer Encounters research network www.queerencounters.org

Contact Harriet Mossop at Harriet.mossop@essex.ac.uk

Other Ways to Care

2025-11-21 20:31:08 UTC

In the shadow of diagnosis - psychiatric archives of queer and trans psychiatric patients from the US in the 1930s-50s

harrietmossop — 2025-11-21 20:35:01 UTC

Perhaps organise an event with Queer Encounters with Regina Kunzel who has written a book about the archive of Benjamin Kunzel’s psychiatric clinical papers. He encouraged / coerced his patients to write about their lives in great detail, so the archive is very rich and interesting (including one queer woman’s erotic collages and drawings and may life stories, critiques of psychoanalytic theory, sexual histories, etc).

We could perhaps stage an encounter with contemporary British psychiatric patients’ writing / Han’s research??

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/I/bo212129044.html

Hi All ❤️ Wanted to share this resource made during lock down.

2025-11-24 20:53:42 UTC