LIVED EXPERIENCE


Framed collections of small instant photographs for which Katharine Lazenby won the biannual Dentons Art Prize in 2018. The recipient of a First Class Honours BA in Fine Art from The Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design in 2014, she uses photography ‘to extract graphic fragments of the everyday, capturing abstract patterns that share her experience and reading of the world around her’.


believe you are making a decision outside your best interests, and are still very unwell, they may start the ball rolling for sectioning.”


Katharine Lazenby said that for much of the time she was aware she wasn’t well enough to be discharged. She added: “On my first few admissions, I think I was more accepting, and willing to put up with a degree of compliance, viewing the staff as the people who knew what they were doing, even if it sometimes felt a bit overbearing. I wanted the treatment to work.” In fact, not long after being discharged after her first year at the north London inpatient facility, she relapsed. She said: “I was soon back in hospital.” I asked about any family visiting. Katharine Lazenby said: “Family visits had to happen at certain times of day, usually in the evening on weekdays, with longer visiting hours at weekends. I do have family in the area, so had visits from my mum and dad.” Some of the visits were ‘helpful, but also really difficult’. She said: “Unfortunately you feel like strangers, because you are sitting in a very odd room.”


A beautiful backdrop


I wondered if her experience at the hospital in south London had been easier than at the facility in the north of the capital. She said: “I loved the hospital grounds; they were beautiful, and seeing the change of seasons, the trees, and the birds. The interior was still institutional, but less so, with lots of natural wood, and more light, and it was better maintained. There weren’t the faded pictures falling out of frames. More attention was paid to the look of the place, and what it was communicating. There was a very active Patient Group.” Katharine Lazenby added: “My main involvement was to create a lot of artwork; at one point I displayed quite a lot of my


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photos, taken in the grounds, along the corridors. They became quite a talking point.” Katharine Lazenby was an inpatient at the south London hospital for a year and a half, in 2015-2016. She added: “On a number of my inpatient stays in the two mental healthcare facilities I would actually get worse. At times I don’t think we give enough thought to how damaging being in a hospital is. Quite often I would go really downhill, and it would take me longer to get better, because those environments do not inspire hope – a key element in the recovery process.”


The impact of buildings I asked if she felt that, nowadays, there could still be an oppressive feel to inpatient mental healthcare buildings that ‘stifled’ such hope. She said: “There’s no question that the building, and the character of interior and exterior, can impact on how people behave within it. If an environment is designed based purely around health and safety, anti-ligature, security, and confinement, that inevitably reinforces to


the staff that that is the prevailing approach. In contrast, if it is uplifting, inspiring, stimulating, and creative, and the rooms’ walls reflect the service-users’ achievements and creativity, it reinforces the fact that the patient group is a real mixture of people with different characters and characteristics. I am thus a big advocate of things like photos and artwork, from which I know I benefited both personally and therapeutically. Photographs and art are another way of people communicating non-verbally, and provide sensory stimulation, which is enormously important.”


In the second ‘half of our discussion, on which we will report in the April 2020 The Network, we moved on to discuss some of the positive work that Katharine Lazenby has got involved in over the past 2-3 years, drawing on her own service-user experience to help others dealing with mental ill health, an experience that she says has been ‘enormously positive’ for her, both in giving something back, and in her own journey toward recovery.


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Talking to Dr Phil Hammond, the seasoned GP, journalist, broadcaster, and after-dinner speaker, at last May’s Design in Mental Health 2019 Awards Dinner.


JANUARY 2020 | THE NETWORK


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