CEO INTERVIEW
Outside Bethnal Green Ventures, investors in Mental Snapp, after winning the 2018 Stelios Foundation Award for Disabled Entrepreneurs.
column, ‘Woman on the Verge’, which she had conceived and successfully pitched to the editor. She elaborated: “It was a light-hearted diary of coming off bipolar medication in order to have a baby. During the time of writing, my NHS service was restructured, and I ended up investigating and writing about this, as well as about the process I was going through. The column was highly popular, and I received some great reader feedback.” One of her longest-standing professional
associations was as a director of Barrage Media, from July 2008 until March 2019. She explained: “Barrage Media is an extended family of film-makers united by their love of story, their value system, and their technical and creative skill.” The collective specialised in mental health, social care, and third sector communications, and had ethical employment policies with its contractors ‘to ensure that the people on your account have personal insight or understanding of the issues that their contributors and subjects may be experiencing’. Production credits included the British Library, MIND, SCIE, Coram Children’s Charity, and Time to Change.
Corporate productions There followed, from May 2013 to September 2015, a period as a freelance consultant at Tiger Mouth, where she was Assistant Producer and Director on corporate productions, and wrote the internal magazine for St Barts and Royal London, conducting and writing up interviews with hospital staff and external suppliers. She also wrote communication material, devised scripts, and organised production logistics. From May 2015 until November 2020,
she founded, and subsequently led, Mental Snapp – ‘a way to actively manage mental health using private media diaries’. As founder, she was responsible for the company’s day-to-day running, setting strategy, managing suppliers and team members, building relationships and partnerships, overseeing deliverables and targets, and representing the company and its vision to its ‘network’, and on public platforms.
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Acting as Master of Ceremonies at Mind’s annual Peerfest conference in 2019.
Previous DiMHN track record She served as an Advisory Board for the Design in Mental Health Network from May 2013-May 2016, contributing service- user representation to the organising committee of the DiMHN’s annual conference, ensuring that service-users were represented in speaker positions, proposing and booking service-user speakers, consulting on the annual awards for design innovation and hospital architecture, and speaking herself in 2016. From September 2014-September
2017, she was a Service-User Governor at Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust. She elaborated: “I attended regular Council of Governors meetings, raising questions from the floor that represented the views of the service-user constituency. I also assisted and advised on committees including the redesign of Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup, and met with heads of departments to discuss innovation in the NHS, particularly in digital services.”
Academic work She is also no stranger to the academic world, having, as an Associate Mental Health Lecturer at MSc level, delivered extended lectures on mental health and film based on her own personal experience and business expertise to MSc students at London Southbank University and the University of Greenwich between May 2012 and January 2020. She explained: “In these three-hour slots, I showed my own film productions, shared personal experiences, and drew conclusions, in discussion with the students, on the future of mental healthcare in the UK.” Her most recent role, prior to becoming the DiMHN’s new CEO, was as Programme manager and Consultant at Inclusion
Unlimited, having been promoted to the role within parent charity, Inclusion Barnet, from her previous position as Project lead, Enablement. She explains: “In these roles I led change and user focus programmes for NHS clients, including supporting and communicating the launch of Barnet, Enfield and Haringey’s first ever Recovery Strategy, and developing and delivering peer worker support and co-production training. I was also a Change Management consultant for NHS clients including the North London Forensic Consortium, Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust, and Barnet Council, and Programme manager for Inclusion Unlimited’s strategy.”
Own first experience When I spoke to Hannah by ‘Teams’ in early January, she explained: “I have been interested in the impact of mental healthcare facilities on service-users for many years – I think dating back to an initial two-month stay at Warneford Hospital in Headington, aged 21, while I was at Oxford University – the first of my four spells as an inpatient. When I arrived, the staff asked me to tell them a bit about myself. The hospital was an old Victorian asylum, which had originally opened in 1826 as the Oxford Lunatic Asylum. I looked at the windows of the room I was in and they had bars on them, so I replied: ‘I can’t tell you about myself in this room, because in it I am just a mad person.’ I felt that to have such a conversation at this juncture I needed to be sitting calmly on a bench, outside in the fresh air. I realised that my whole identity had changed when I walked into the building, which was the thing determining my identity.
‘Power architecture’ “No doubt because I was at Oxford University,” she continued, “I was also really used to power architecture, and the Warneford Hospital was certainly all about that – the kind of architecture that celebrates the great and the good – usually the patriarch who created the building. On arriving at Warneford,” she explained, “you had to walk below an imposing three times life size statue of the founder, Victorian cleric, Samuel Warneford, just to enter. At Oxford University, of course, there was also lots of power architecture, which seemed to invite you into the ‘club’, tell you how important it was, and confirm that, as a student, you were a valued member. In contrast, entering a mental healthcare facility as a service-user, you were not a member of
I have been interested in the impact of mental healthcare facilities on service-users for many years – I think dating back to an initial two-month stay at Warneford Hospital in Headington, aged 21, while I was at Oxford University – the first of my four spells as an inpatient
FEBRUARY 2023 | THE NETWORK
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