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THIRD QUALITATIVE RESEARCH ON MENTAL HEALTH CONFERENCE
‘The disabled self: theoretical and empirical approaches to stigma and recovery’
Nottingham University August 25th-27th 2010
The conference was attended by members of CEIMH, The University of Birmingham and Suresearch. This summary will be followed by a more complete account of the two and a half days of the conference.[Index here.]
On the first day (Wednesday) there was a link with a previous conference at the same venue on Qualitative Methods in Psychology. More relevant to service users was Andrew Roberts’ presentation on the ‘Survivor Movement’. Andrew’s thesis was basically that history should be considered as a method in the social sciences (as it already is in much continental theory). Andrew has visited the CEIMH and given a presentation on behalf of ‘Survivor History’. He is also responsible for their archives.There were presentations over the course of the next two days centred round stigma, recovery and women’s and service user experiences with input from both students and professional academics from British universities and from Finland and other countries. The audience (in total there were about 200) were also from these same institutions and included people from as far afield as Australia. The structure of the conference included both plenary speakers and workshops running concurrently, and thus I had to be selective about which of the latter I could attend and report back on. (I took personal interest as my main criterion.)
I was particularly interested in attending the presentations by the Aston Business School on research they are doing about ‘effective team-working in community mental health’ which members of Suresearch have been involved in. These covered the first two morning sessions on Thursday.
There were plenary presentations from, among others, Jan Wallcraft and Laura Griffith, both with whom members of Suresearch will be familiar, and workshops by PhD students Lynn Tang (University of Warwick) and Beverley Smith (Birmingham).
There was a plenary by Rubina Jasani (of BSMHFT) on the ENRICH programme in Birmingham, which is led by Dr. Swaran Singh, drawing on qualitative interviews conducted across the primary care trust area on the relationship of home, community and neighbourhood, as part of a larger study investigating ethnicity and experiences of care.
An underlying theme of many speakers was that of identity, such as in Theo Stickley’s paper on ‘the arts, identity and belonging’, in which the method was a narrative analysis, and many referred to the comparison between first-person reports or ‘lived experience’ and diagnoses by psychiatrists. I found Bradley Lewis’s presentation particularly interesting on ‘Narrative Psychiatry’, about the gradual realisation that there is a need for the role of stories in clinical encounters.
The two and a half days were both highly enjoyable and informative. This was the third in a series of such conferences, the first was held in Finland and there are plans for another in two years’ time. The conference was organized by Dr. Hugh Middleton and Prof. Nick Manning, both of Nottingham, and Prof. Vilma Hanninen.
Duncan Purslow (Suresearch)September 2010
DAB-P(10/10/10)