CEO INTERVIEW
Above: Mental Snapp being presented at the MindTech conference in 2017 by Alison Faulkener, service-user researcher and academic. Left: Hannah Chamberlain with participants at a Mental Snapp workshop at Dragon Café in the City of London, and some of the contributions at the workshop.
the club, and never would be. Buildings tell you who you are, and the message my first inpatient experience gave me was that I had a fixed identity, that was never going to be redeemed. That experience was also almost certainly what spurred my initial interest in buildings and their impact on service-users in mental healthcare, which has remained with me since.”
Filming in a forensic unit Later, while at Barrage Media, Hannah Chamberlain did some work with John Laing and MAAP Architects as part of their bid for Roseberry Park Hospital, a new 312-bedded inpatient mental health complex providing Adult, Older Adult, and Forensic mental health services in Middlesbrough, which opened in 2010. Part of this involved filming in an old forensic unit which the new facility would replace, and interviewing service-users there. She elaborated: “John Laing asked me to make three films – one for service-users, one for staff, and one for visitors and family. This made me think: ‘As service-user, how can you ensure that your identity is not fixed forever?’ The answer was perhaps by helping to create a building that doesn’t fix you in a category, and allows for the possibility of recovery, and of changing your identity in the future. Over time I have made quite a lot of films, and interviewed service-users in a variety of settings about their experiences, which I think – coupled with my own experience – gives me some valuable insights.”
A bleak unused former asylum While studying for her BTEC in Film, Video, and Documentary Production, at Westminster Adult Education Centre from 1977-1998, Hannah Chamberlain had another experience which shaped her thinking on the profound effect that the buildings the mentally unwell are housed in can have on their psyche. She said: “Struck by the bleakness and imposing nature of the old Claybury Hospital (a former psychiatric hospital in Woodford Bridge in
THE NETWORK | FEBRUARY 2023
the London Borough of Redbridge once dubbed ‘the most important asylum built in England after 1875’ by Historic England), which I had already photographed, I noticed that it was up for sale, and thought – ‘My goodness, it’s like a massive white elephant’. I then made an appropriately titled film about it as part of my course. What was particularly interesting about was that the former asylum had the feeling of having been very unloved for a long time, with graffiti that took up the whole of one wall reading: ‘If only these walls could talk’. I think many of the service- users in such buildings had a real love/ hate relationship with them. I also filmed at another former – again by then unused and empty – asylum in Friern Barnet, where there was still brick dust on the pharmacy table, and someone had come back in, jumped on the table with hobnail boots on, and written in the brick dust: ‘Swainy came back and he wants his drugs’.”
A feeling of ambivalence The feeling of ambivalence about one’s surroundings while in a mental healthcare setting had been apparent to Hannah from her first spell at Warneford Hospital. She said: “You’d have a conversation with a fellow service-user asking how they were, and they’d say: ‘Well, I’m leaving today’, and everyone would congratulate them, but someone else in the same position would say: ‘Well, I’m about to get kicked out’, so there was this feeling of the hospital both as a sanctuary, and at the same time, a sort of prison.”
Only two film crews allowed in Returning to her filming at Claybury Hospital, she said: “I remember that there were only two film crews allowed in – one for a fashion shoot, and us. To be honest, I think I was just really angry about my own earlier inpatient experience, and also wanted to tell some interesting mental health stories, so we filmed the architecture, and then set it against the
stories of people who’d been there. We had photos of the ward and the water tower from the top, and all the items that had simply been left there, abandoned. It was almost as if somebody had shouted ‘Fire’, and everybody inside had just dropped everything and run. There were even coffee cups with coffee still inside them. “To clear the filing cabinets inside and
ready them for sale, they had removed all the medical records and dumped them on the floor. I picked up a handful at random, and in my hands I soon had the story of a woman who had entered in the asylum in the 1930s, pregnant, and stayed there until the 90s – 60 whole years. It made a really strong impression – the idea of people’s stories being trapped in these buildings and needing to be freed, and them needing to be able to define themselves away from a building. By 2003 Claybury – which was, I believe, one of London’s first asylums – had been turned into luxury housing.”
Work with Trusts and service-users In addition to her film, lecturing, and media work, Hannah Chamberlain also has considerable experience working with mental health Trusts. She explained: “I spent the period from May 2015 until November 2020, for instance, running my own business – Mental Snapp – which I established to enable service-users to make video diaries to help them manage their mental health and tell their stories. Immediately before becoming the DIMHN’s new CEO, I then spent about two years consulting for the NHS from a lived experience standpoint, working for a charity called Inclusion Unlimited – basically doing lived experience consultancy for NHS Trusts, particularly for Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust and the North London Forensic Consortium. The Trusts were looking at how they could embed recovery practices into what their staff did, so I ran a programme which then became the
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