DESIGN IN MENTAL HEALTH 2022 KEYNOTES
While those with serious mental illness should have routine health checks to ensure lung disease, diabetes, and other serious conditions ‘are being headed off’, they often don’t get them, Sarah Hughes believes.
exercise in this room will have answered the social value question, and indeed reached that question and wondered what to write. In fact,” she said, “it’s fairly straightforward if you just go and speak to the people living and experiencing the services you’re providing, but still a critical part of that process. So,” she continued, “we must prioritise housing and homelessness, so that we can provide the best mental health intervention in the world, and in some cases I believe that we do. However,” she added, “if you’re sending somebody who’s just had early intervention for psychosis back to a bedsit with a leaking roof and damp-filled toilets, you might as well be throwing that intervention into a leaky bucket. So again, let’s not lose sight of people’s social living conditions, and what’s happening to them in their real lives.”
Inclusive education On the subject of ‘inclusive education’, she asked delegates: “In your environments, how are people accessing training opportunities, what’s happening in the services you’re working alongside, and is the training inclusive, thoughtful, and driving down inequality?” Digital connectivity must by now – she was certain – be a priority for mental healthcare providers. On an altogether different tack, she
argued that the importance of flood protection and climate resilience were growing in mental health spheres, with more focus on understanding what environments needed to look like, and ‘what needs to protected’, to enable mental health inequality to be driven down. Sarah Hughes said: “We know that
The Centre for Mental Health believes ‘mental health is made in communities’, and that providing opportunities for mutual aid, collective action, and positive identity, ‘reinforces positive mental health’.
climate change is actually festering mental illness around the globe, for all sorts of reasons. If you live in a part of the country where you’re going to be flooded every winter, your mental health is going to be incredibly poor.”
‘Co-production in building design’ In designing mental healthcare facilities, the speaker said ‘thinking about the whole person’ was key – often involving what is known as ‘co-production’ with service- users. She said: “When I spoke earlier about what social value means, it’s often much easier and more effective to talk to the people that are going to be living in a new or refurbished building, so that we can tailor things to people’s needs and adapt when necessary, especially for neurodiversity. This is really one of the last areas where we’re just not conquering servicing the real needs that people are experiencing; neurodiversity comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and yet we often don’t think about that in relation to design.” The Centre for Mental Health had done
‘a huge amount of work’ with colleagues around improving access to psychological therapies. Sarah Hughes’ view was that, pre-2020, IAPT services had not effectively served people from black and minority ethnic communities ‘for a long time’. While numbers were now increasing, and outcomes improving, the speaker said this was ‘because we really have had to motor on cultural competence’. This necessitated a diverse and representative workforce, ‘with all those working in mental healthcare accountable to the communities they serve for achieving change and improvement’.
We know climate change is actually festering mental illness around the globe, for all sorts of reasons. If you live in a part of the country where you’re going to be flooded every winter, your mental health is going to be incredibly poor
38
Inappropriate medication? Turning to ‘key aspects of physical health and equality’, Sarah Hughes said people with serious mental illness were often highly medicated with drugs that hadn’t really developed that much over the last 30 years. Equally, while those with serious mental illness should undergo routine health checks to ensure that lung disease, diabetes, and other serious conditions ‘are being headed off’, such individuals often didn’t get these health checks. She said: “In fact they are at an all-time low right now, so how can we pressurise our GPs to make sure they’re getting in people with serious mental illness?”
On the topic of smoking cessation,
screening, and preventative healthcare, Sarah Hughes said many of the associated conditions were preventable, ‘given a proactive, inclusive approach, tailored to help with physical activity and healthy weight management’. In fact, she added, the Centre was currently undertaking a piece of work on ‘what it’s like to really struggle around food poverty’ – a ‘growing, emergent, evolving, terrible situation we’re finding ourselves in in this country’.
Vaccinations Before closing, she reiterated the importance of those with mental ill health ensuring they receive their vaccinations, saying: “It’s really important that we get our people into the vaccination centres, and get them the support they need. This is not about whether vaccinations are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but we do need to get people in to get their vaccinations.” In closing a though-provoking conference address, Sarah Hughes showed slides of some of the Centre for Mental Health’s reports, noting that they were downloadable form its website, at
www.centreformentalhealth.org.uk/ ‘any time’. She then thanked the audience for their attention, and handed back to session chair, Jenny Gill, who took a number of audience questions.
n AUGUST 2022 | THE NETWORK
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40
