CEO INTERVIEW
How lived experience shaped new CEO’s goals
The Design in Mental Health Network recently appointed its first ever CEO. A former service-user who has worked with mental healthcare providers, managed her own businesses, is a filmmaker and lecturer, a passionate campaigner, and has delivered both peer worker support and co- production training, Hannah Chamberlain recently spoke to The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie.
Hannah Chamberlain received her secondary education at St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith from 1984-1991, gaining ‘A’ levels in English, Latin, and Greek. During her time there, she explains that some of her notable milestones included joining the debating team, winning a flower arranging competition, and travelling to Dublin to represent Chile in the Model United Nations debate. She went on to study for, and gain, a BA in English Literature at Oxford University, where she also developed her skills in photography and film-making, joining
the associated University societies, and gaining considerable enjoyment from both these ‘extra-curricular’ interests. It was while at the University that she first experienced mental health issues. She said: “My extended essay on Coleridge had to be completed three times, as I had to take a break from Oxford due to my first and second episodes, and, during the last two, was not allowed ‘within four miles of Carfax’, so couldn’t access the Oxford libraries. I was one of the last generation to hand-write their essays, since back then the Internet didn’t exist. I completed
half my Finals in the Oxford Examination Schools, and half in the Warneford Hospital near Oxford.”
A passion for film Keen to pursue her passion for film, on graduating she studied for a BTEC in Film and Video, and Documentary Production, at Westminster Adult Education, from 1997-1998, successfully gaining the qualification. While on the course she directed, produced, and developed, before presenting it to a student group, a short documentary film, titled ‘The Great Psychiatric White Elephant’, telling the story of the closure of Claybury Asylum in the London Borough of Redbridge, now part of a historical archive of the service- user movement.
She subsequently had a four-year
spell, from 1999-2003, working regularly for Mental Health Media, directing and filming communications videos for its clients, including the Department of Health, the National Institute of Mental Health, The King’s Fund, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and the British Library. During this period, she also ran workshops training service-users in media skills, while shortly after, from 2005-2006, she worked as an Assistant Producer on the development of Channel 4’s Big Art Project, ‘a highly ambitious production featuring the commissioning, development, and creation, of six pieces of public art round the UK’. She said: “I was instrumental in securing a pivotal chunk of public funding – £350,000 – around which the rest of the deal fell into place.”
Writing about coming off medication In 2007, she had a nine-month spell as a freelance writer for Mental Health Today, penning a monthly
Right: Hannah’s book, Good Mental Health is an Art, was published in 2022, written in her caravan in Whitstable, and launched at Whitstable Car Boot Fair – ‘a very ordinary location, just like the ordinary moments which the book encourages the reader to enjoy’.
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