Star Wards

For all of you tantalised by the account in our latest newsletter of the energetic and imaginative TalkWell developments in Birmingham and Solihull, here's the latest from Patrick. I apologise for the poverty of my IT skills which don't extend to including the wonderful photo of the event and fab graphics on the information Patrick sent me, but these can be seen in their full glory in the Members in Action feature.

Thanks again Patrick!

TALKWELL FORUM LAUNCH

ADULTS OF WORKING AGE: ACUTE SERVICES PROGRAMME

Talkwell is an initiative that was developed through Star Wards for non-registered staff. It focuses on the art of initiating and maintaining therapeutic conversation. In January and February 2010, over 100 staff attended Talkwell Workshops across the Acute Services Programme in the Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health Trust.

The workshops were lively affairs and generated lots of ideas for improving therapeutic engagement on our acute inpatient wards. One idea was for the programme to create a regular forum where staff could come together to hear updates, share their experiences and create new ideas. As a result, the Acute Services Programme TalkWell Forum was launched on 15^th March 2010. Several staff attended the launch at our Core Activity Centre on Endeavour Court where our guest of honour was Denise Wilson, Executive Director for Quality, Improvement and Patient Experience.

We were pleased to announce the winners of our First Talkwell competition. This project was launched on our Endeavour Units and is entitled ‘This is My Life.’ For this project, service users are helped to develop a scrapbook about their lives in order to help them regain a fuller sense of their individuality and who they are as people rather than just being a ‘service user’. Support and encouragement is provided to individuals to write poems, songs, choose newspaper cuttings, pictures and photos reflecting their own experiences to offer an insight into their lives. The completed scrapbooks are the service users’ property to keep. The books will help them to reflect upon their experiences and lives. They are being regularly updated. We liked this project as it seemed to really grasp the ethos of Talkwell – making people feel really listened to and understood. Well done to Emily, Tracey and Marie who win a special afternoon tea for the Core Activity Centre staff and service users. They were presented with their award by our Inpatient Services Managers Hugh McCreedy and Elaine Murray.

For further details about the Acute Services TalkWell Forum please contact Patrick Cullen, Professional Head of Nursing and Performance, Acute Services Programme, Adults of Working Age Division – This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Click here to download as a PDF

If one wanted to create a TV programme that fostered terror about how dangerous mentally ill people are, helpful ingredients would be for a film to:

• Be authored by someone bereaved by homicide committed by someone with a mental illness
• be loaded with details of the tragedies which build up into the most horrific visual and emotional picture of the danger posed by mentally ill people.
• Ramp up the horror through repeated inclusion of the specifics of weapons used, the film's music, photographic techniques and the sheer, raw, agonising trauma of the bereaved families

 BBC2 achieved this and so much more in the documentary Who Killed My Dad? Broadcast at 9PM last night. (It’s available on BBC iplayer, but mercifully only for 7 more days,  so if you want to thoroughly depress yourself, click on:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00r8zyx

 There’s a fundamental tension between portraying the agony of bereaved families, providing factual information about the homicides (and suicides, not covered in the programme) of mentally ill people and the emotional impact of this on people’s views of mental illness. Including on those of us struggling to lead a vaguely normal life despite the devastation our illness creates. The most generous interpretation of the programme and its intention is that it was ‘factual’, appropriately sympathetic to the victims’ families and wasn’t a programme designed to challenge stigma (to put it mildly!!)

 But that would be a very simplistic response. The reality is that it used powerful and effective media techniques which have a disproportionate emotional impact on viewers. Because of the prevalence of mental illness, most people have someone close to them who has been severely affected. Yet behavioural psychology research shows that direct experience can be cognitively ‘trumped’ by the many other sources of information we’re exposed to. Especially those with a high emotional content.

 If watching the programme is too unappealing, or for some reason you want to read what the film-maker, Julian Hendy, wrote about his father’s tragic murder in (unsurprisingly) the Daily Mail: http://tinyurl.com/dailymailunbalanced.

 I’ve also done a blog for Mind and there are interesting comments following this:

http://www.mind.org.uk/blog/3037_mental_illness_and_violence