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As a peer support worker, it’s been pretty much business as usual during Covid 19 – except for the obvious PPE and social distancing! So no goodbye hugs with patients as they leave, just an elbow touch and a smile behind my mask.

The theme of the third blog, in a series from our Public Involvement coordinator and a member of our Advisory board, is 'post pandemic' and the blog addresses how we will learn from our experiences. World Mental Health Day 2020 is on the 10^th October. Days, weeks, months and awareness thereof have always been a complicated issue for me. On the one hand, without many an awareness ‘day’, ‘week’ or ‘month’ I would not be as educated on topics as I am. 

During our time of being physically distant from the Institute, our Public Involvement Coordinator, and a member of our Advisory Board, have begun producing a series of blogs. They felt felt it would be a great opportunity to invite you to read about a single topic from their individual perspectives. This is the second blog in the series, this time written by a member of our Advisory Board, the theme of this blog is: 'post pandemic' what comes next?

During our time of being physically distant from the Institute, both myself, and a member of our Advisory Board, will be producing a series of blogs. We felt it would be a great opportunity to invite you to read about a single topic from our individual perspectives. We chose our first topic of ‘honesty’ because it is something which is incredibly important to both of us and when talking about our experiences, it became clear we had some completely different, and some very similar, experiences; good and bad.

So, the saying goes, we should all be looking at what’s on the inside, not making decisions based on someone’s outward appearance, but understanding what’s on the inside is complicated and grows throughout a lifetime.

Outrage from around the world in the past few weeks would tell us that we don’t do that.

Me, anxiety and a PhD. I wish I had a space to share.

As I await my PhD viva, I am as anxious as can be for reasons that I cannot explain, because up until a few weeks ago, I was still checking my email several times a day to see if a viva date has been set, so anyone would think that finally knowing the date and time will comfort my anxious nerves. It did not. 

Sitting down to write any blog can be difficult, this blog on honesty, in the area of research, was quite daunting, not knowing who exactly my audience will be. I just want to give a little insight on a lay person’s view of being involved in research and how being honest with them can certainly improve the outcomes. All that I write comes from my own opinions and experiences.

Today sees my 14^th day working from home and the second week for my other half who can’t work from home as he is a painter and decorator. However, the big bonus is I am getting my house decorated. Always a silver lining. So far, we are both safe and well and enjoying exploring being together 24 hours a day. With our busy lives we can often be so tired that relationships become difficult because you don’t communicate. I know when I have been dashing about doing work and Badminton, going to the gym etc. I am often so exhausted that I just fall asleep after tea, then wake up and go to bed, leaving my partner alone downstairs.

Hello, my name is Kate. I recently started working for the Institute of Mental Health as the Public Involvement Lead. 

I completed my induction with my Trust and then I set about meeting colleagues and peers around the building and those further afield connected to our work. Happily starting to understand the infrastructure of the Institute, the projects underway within the Centres of Excellence, the who’s who of Involvement and reading the excellent work of my predecessors. Then, no sooner had I started to pick up some real work and understanding the lay of the land, along came change.  

Not just the usual NHS change; Workforce Change or Transformational Change, the language of change within the NHS we are so familiar with, but no, real tangible change across the whole world. Dramatic, large scale, professional and private change immediately across our countries and our communities.

Daily announcements, updates, internal emails, Whatsapp chats, social media feeds, all busy with news, updates, memes and links to more information. Everything all colliding in our information streams that many of us have often kept separate, compartmentalised and ordered.

Now, as things settle a little and we know we are here for the long haul the biggest change, providing we are fortunate enough to be well and continuing in this new normal, is how we humans interact with one another.  It was a change many of us were not completely ready for and especially not anticipating of its speed. However, thanks to professional IT departments and flexible working we have these virtual means quickly embedded into our newly collided home and work environments. For many in research this is a way of life and has been for a long time but what about the audiences, contributors, participants and others that don’t fit the category of those with a staff email? Those who don’t have a professional IT department to prop up their immediate needs?

Firstly, my immediate response as a public involvement specialist was one of the human need. Are my contributors and contacts safe, well and supported? Do they have any needs I can help or signpost them to? Are they wishing to remain in contact with me at this time or do they want to pull up the drawbridge on their current involvement and focus on home-schooling, vulnerable friends and relatives or their own needs?

Once I was able to answer this question and encourage my peers to do the same if they hadn’t, it left me pondering what does this mean for Public Involvement within our research? Particularly in this new job where I didn’t even know what many of my contributors, peers and colleagues looked like yet let alone having the relationships and trust to work in isolation without the warm, open conversations of face to face interactions that I have relied on so heavily in my work to date. 

So, I will be continuing to explore this and sharing what we do next.  If you want to hear more, join me on the journey. I also hope this regular update will act as an invitation for you to engage with me, directly or with others within the IMH and our wider community. This is a fantastic opportunity to better engage and involve public contributions to our work, our thinking, our discoveries and our direction - come with us.

Stay safe and take care

Kate

We all want gold standard care for all our patients –right? We want the best for people. So if we unpick that assumption a little further what should gold standard look like? Often when such questions are asked you need to read a long diatribe of words to get to the point. Not in this case. In this case, it’s simple – Trauma informed care.

Here’s a fact to kick us off; - “Notably, people in contact with mental health services who have been sexually or physically abused in childhood typically have longer and more frequent hospital admissions, are prescribed more medication, are more likely to self-harm and are more likely to attempt to kill themselves than people without experiences of childhood abuse” (Read et al., 2007).

This one fact alone should be enough to make us all stop and question what we do and how we do it, after all everyone want to reduce admissions in this day and age of cutbacks.

Recently, the British Society of Gerontology held a joint meeting for two Special Interest Groups; ‘Educational Gerontology’ and ‘Technology and Ageing’. The event was organised to coincide with the 100^th anniversary of the commission on Adult Education.

Sharon Clancy kicked off the event with a presentation: ‘Celebrating adult education – 100^th anniversary of the commission’. This was about the 1919 commission on adult education which was part of the reconstruction after World War 1, aiming to support education of the population who had recently been given the right to vote. The commission called for education ‘throughout the life of the adult’. Sharon noted that the commission reflected the changing nature of work and had a ‘civic rhetoric’.

A new innovative group called the ‘Association of Mental Health Peer Researchers’ was launched on World Mental Health Day 2019. The aim of this collective is to bring together people with lived experience of mental health issues, who are doing mental health research, across the University. The official launch was attended by our key allies from different Schools and research groups, with the aim of informing them about our work so that they can support us and sign-post potential members.

Following an endorsement from the Institute of Mental Health’s Director, Prof. Martin Orrell, the aims and objectives of the group were outlined (see below), and then two of our members showcased their research: Minh Dang spoke about her ongoing PhD work on the wellbeing of survivors of modern slavery, and Stefan Rennick-Egglestone shared about how peer researchers are involved in the Narrative Experiences Online (NEON) study. There was a buzz about the whole event, and people were excited about our vision for our work going forward.

“You can’t go back and change the beginning but you can start where you are and change the end.” CS Lewis

The 7^th November 2019 marks 4 years for me as a peer support worker. It is something of a miracle. I had completed the accredited peer support training in the summer of 2015, when my bed was still warm from being detained on a section 2, where I also detoxed from alcohol. Then it was time to apply for a role, after a year of no work following redundancy, I got the job. I remember being pleased, amazed and somewhat shocked but had felt that finally I had hope and direction.

So, I had a start date of 7^th October, but as the day approached I became scared and anxious and my inner critic told me, quite clearly, that I wouldn’t be able to do the job, that I was useless and that it would be better if I just gave up and lost everything. I self-harmed and cried, not knowing what to do. Eventually, I called the peer support lead and told her that I couldn’t do the job. I expected her to graciously accept the fact that I wouldn’t be doing the role – but instead she just said: “well leave it a month and see how you feel next month?” I couldn’t quite believe it but accepted her offer and took a further month to regroup and decide that perhaps, maybe I could do the job.

Hospitals in England are facing unprecedented demand that they are struggling to meet. More people are being admitted to hospital in emergency situations that ever before. The increase in demand has led some people to look for admissions that could be considered avoidable. One group of people who have received particular attention are care home residents.

Care home residents are amongst the ‘oldest old’ in society – research suggests that over half of all care home residents aged 85 years or above. What is more, care home residents often have multiple health conditions and a wide range of complex health and social care needs. For some care home residents, the risks associated with a stay in hospital can outweigh the potential benefits.

When I was a student nurse, I often wondered if there was a space outside the acute mental health wards where people could experience the type of freedom that they talked about away from the mundane, restricted and controlled environment that offered little or no activities to stimulate the mind. I asked for placements in community mental health services, and I was very disappointed to see that some of the nurses in the community mental health services had similar attitudes as some nurses that I saw on the wards.

Some mental health nurses are tired with very high levels of empathy fatigue, lack of compassion and the depersonalisation of people that had their identities replaced with labels such as bed number 3, the one that paces about and the one this, and the one that. Thus, when I qualified as a mental health nurse, I knew exactly the kind of nurse that I wanted to be; the opposite of the nurses that I described above.

Call for papers!

If you are an IMH doctoral candidate, part of IMH Managed Innovation Networks (MINs), or an early-career researcher (including research assistants, research fellows, research-active clinicians and service users) please consider submitting an abstract for the event to showcase your work.

Oral and poster presentations accepted. Send completed abstract submission form found here to Amna Al Shamsi: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by no later than 25 March 2019.

You need to be connected to the IMH to submit an abstract but attendance is open to all.

Have you ever felt a gap in knowledge on best practice when researching people with mental health conditions (MHCs)? As a junior researcher in this area- I certainly have! And I know many of my colleagues have as well. It’s a gap which hasn’t been filled thus far by other, more general skills courses - as, after all, there are some more unique factors involved in researching people with MHCs which not everyone has knowledge or experience of. But fear not - the Centre for Mental Health and Human Rights (CMHHR) have answers!

It’s really important that we as service users and patients can talk about service experiences, share common ground and negotiate service improvements together. This, to me, is the essence of co-production: making meaningful change together. However, to do this well takes time and effort all round.

Co-production isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, a tick box exercise and whilst it may add more time onto a project, the outcome of a better fit-for-purpose service is worth the effort.Often there is a lack of time for people implementing new changes to circulate information about involvement opportunities. True co-production takes time, detailed conversations, time to ‘think’ (often left out of NHS change projects) and just general involvement and communication.

This longitudinal study of American teenagers by Ra and colleagues, sought to explore the association between digital media use and symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), as well as explore the relationship between high frequency digital media use and ADHD symptom severity.

The study is topical as all parents worry about the relative amount of screen time versus green time that their children engage in, however on the basis of this study should we be concerned about the relationship between digital media use and an enhanced risk of later ADHD?

Dear reader,

As 2018 draws to a close we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support.  We've had some great content this year and as always it's been a privilege to be able to host the research, experience and opinions of our wonderful collaborators & contributors. We hope you have a brilliant festive season and look forward to sharing new content with you in January.