DIMH 2021 CONFERENCE
Listening to service-users is imperative with design
The Design in Mental Health Network has always recognised the value of hearing from service- users on their experiences in a variety of mental healthcare settings – something reflected in a number of presentations at last August’s DiMH 2021 conference in Coventry. One of the speakers with forthright views on how the physical environment in inpatient mental health settings, and the way those with mental health issues are perceived and treated, could be improved, is artist and speaker, James Leadbitter, alias ‘the vacuum cleaner’, who gave a thought-provoking presentation. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.
‘The vacuum cleaner’ is the ‘alias’ of UK- based artist, James Leadbitter, who ‘makes candid, provocative, and playful art about the world being messed up’. Drawing on his own experience of mental ill health, he works with young people, healthcare professionals, and vulnerable adults, ‘to challenge how mental health is understood, treated, and experienced.’ As he puts it, he ‘wants to find better ways to go mad’. ‘With roots in activism and radical art’, he has created both ‘one-man interventions’, and ‘large-scale actions’, as well as performance, installation, and film, with his work shown in galleries, theatres, hospitals, and schools, and appearing on streets and in public spaces internationally.
A DiMH 2021 award-winner James Leadbitter was welcomed to the stage at the Design in Mental Health 2021 conference by another expert-by- experience, People Participation Worker at East London NHS Trust, Katharine Lazenby. Introducing him, she explained that at the previous evening’s 2021 Design in Mental Health Awards, his artwork
project ‘Oh My GOSH, You’re Wellcome Kitten’, created in conjunction with Great Ormond Street Arts – the arts programme at London’s Great Ormond Steet Hospital – had won the Art Installation of the Year Award (The Network – October 2021). The project saw young people and nurses from the hospital’s Mildred Creek Unit collaborate for six months with ‘the vacuum cleaner’, Muf Art/Architecture, and GOSH Arts, to explore questions including: ‘If young people with significant mental health challenges are supported to collaborate on what their care could be like, what happens?’, and ‘What if these young people create the boundaries for making art, share their wellbeing wants and needs, and become professional designers?’
Studio space created
The group created a studio at GOSH, and, during weekly workshops there, and trips outside the hospital, ‘mapped out what the perfect mental health environment looked like’. They used cardboard, clay, performance, soap, tin foil, the nurses’
James Leadbitter, alias ‘the vacuum
cleaner’, said: “The NHS should be talking to people that have been on a journey and got better, and employing them.”
bodies, orchids, sheepskin, and ‘a generous helping of silliness’, to ‘understand what they wanted and needed from a healthcare environment’, and the people who care for them there. The resulting body of research, which includes handmade objects and personal writing, informed the creation of a new artwork, ‘Oh My GOSH, You’re
Wellcome...Kitten’, now on display in the Wellcome Collection’s permanent exhibition, ‘Being Human’. GOSH’s Health Care Planning team has also harnessed the research to support the redevelopment of a new CAMHS unit.
‘Fugly’ spaces
James Leadbitter began his presentation by showing a slide themed “Fugly spaces make me want to die’, and explained that it showed Brett Ward at the City & Hackney Mental Health Centre in London, where he had been admitted under the Mental Health Act 1983. He said: “Most mental health spaces are really ‘fugly’. In case there’s any uncertainty about the word, it combines ‘fuck and ugly’.” He went on to explain that his artwork, relating to his time in inpatient mental health settings, had begun, ‘as all these things do, in a moment of madness’, before asking: “What if the places we need to feel safe, to experience our pain, and to be mad, were better designed for mad people, by mad people? What would it be like? I’ve been in enough mental health hospitals to know something has to change, and massively.”
Original plan realised He had thus ‘formulated a plan into a project’, and said he would now read ‘the original proposition’ he had made in 2013, and ‘take the audience on the journey’ about his subsequent work. He said: “One of the key premises of my artwork, ‘Madlove – A Designer Asylum’ (‘a long- term project that blends research, design, building, and exhibitions, to reimagine mental health support and the environments this support happens in’), is
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