Embedding recovery principles into secure services: Progress and challengesThursday 8 July 2010 8.30am to 4.30pm Easthampstead Park Conference Centre, Wokingham, Berkshire The challenge for everyone using and providing secure mental health services is to find effective and meaningful ways of embedding recovery into care pathways. The second bi-annual Recovery in Secure Services Conference, hosted by […]

Great advice for patients, professionals, pets….A report presented to the Foresight Project on communicating the evidence base for improving people’s well-being suggests that building the following five actions into our day-to-day lives is important for well-being: Connect With the people around you. With family, friends, colleagues and neighbours. At home, work, school or in your […]

Such a brilliant series of daily cartoons! We’re deeply grateful to Ralph Lazar and Lisa Swerling for letting us include their fab cartoons on our home page. They really add homeliness to pageyness! And we hope that having a new cartoon each day contributes to you wanting to visit the website regularly.Here are some of my favourite recent […]

99.999999999999999999% of you don’t ‘follow us’ on Twitter, perhaps because you don’t like terms like follow, tweet or retweet, let alone geotagging or hovercard. (But many thanks to the one of you who is tuning into http://twitter.com/starwards)! So that no-one misses out on the occasional posting that might be of interest, and with the joy […]

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 […]

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 […]

What looks like a hotel, sounds like a health spa and has groovy facilities including a cinema? The super-snazzy new hospital in Grimsby, Harrison House. Ellie Walsh, East Service Manager of Meridian Lodge (Lodge?? How cool a name is that?!), was the ward manager of the hospital’s predecessor at Diana Princess of Wales Hospital. I […]

Jigsaws are brilliant, and without wishing to over-therapise a simple leisure pleasure, they provide a wealth of recovery-building skills. The mass of pieces begin as a complete mess. It looks impossible to rearrange into anything coherent. But. Reassuringly, there’s a system for starting to work it out – doing the edges, defining the parameters. You […]

It’s a long story, but the short-hand explanation is, as ever, my very naughty borderline personality disorder. Hours of emergency therapy later, I can see that intense stimulation even of the gloriously enjoyable variety, triggers my ‘overload’ switch and that sets off all the tedious BPD self-destructive stuff. Ian Hulatt, our chair (better known for […]

The superb work being done by staff on mental health wards has been recognised with an OBE! Huge congratulations to all of you doing such heroic work, with such commitment and creativity and in seriously challenging circumstances. What with the recession and all that, the Palace can’t run to a medal for all 600 of […]