DIMH 2021 CONFERENCE
What would the perfect mental health hospital be like?
Madlove
Some of the ‘likes and dislikes’ of being in a hospital setting identified by young patients at Great Ormond Street Hospital.
He said: “A young servicer-user told me they hate it when staff don’t have such a balance, because they become anxious and stressed, and take it out on them.” He continued: “Hospitals should be safe places, community spaces, with facilities for art, music, cinema, farms, spas, and rooms of Fabergé eggs and hammers.” Each site should also ‘be about a range of spectrums of experiences’.
Practicality of ideas
The speaker said that when he suggested such ideas, he was often told they were ‘too risky’, expensive, or generally ‘unrealistic’. He said: “I have a friend who is a senior (medical) consultant, and during the pandemic, his organisation completely rebuilt a hospital while it was still operating. Don’t tell me then that these things are not possible.” As to how these ‘nice ideas’ could be put into practice, James Leadbitter said: “My team and I have done it in two main ways. Firstly, we’ve been making things in the art world to test ideas. We began by opening a temporary mental health space in Liverpool, designed by a small architectural practice, Projects Office, in London, and we had about 300 people actively using the space coming to the workshops.” He continued: “You’ll notice there’s no anti-ligature design in what we do, because we believe that it’s actually more important to ask somebody: ‘Are you okay? Do you need something?’, because whatever you do, you cannot design self-harm out of mental healthcare. After all, a service-user can harm themself on a wall, and we’re hardly going to get rid of all walls now.”
‘Safety as a feeling’
The speaker’s view was that there was a need ‘to start talking about safety as a feeling, as well as safety of design’. He said: “Mental healthcare facilities shouldn’t feel like a hospital, but should be more like an art installation, with different zones – quiet spaces, and communal spaces.” In
THE NETWORK | JANUARY 2022
Architect, Projects Office, created “a beautiful little model, down the centre of which was a town square, a bakery, a social area, studios, ‘individualised bedrooms’, treehouses, and ‘all kinds of stuff’”.
disseminating such messages, James Leadbitter said his team had made good use of the media to emphasise that ‘there are other ways of doing this’. He explained: “We put on an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London for its ‘Bedlam: The Asylum and Beyond’ event (which took Bethlem Royal Hospital as its starting point, juxtaposing historical material and medical records with individual testimonies and artworks), and deepened our research, visiting seven very varied (acute, inner city, CAMHS, low, medium, and high security) mental health facilities hospitals in England. We also spoke to a lot of people of colour and queer people, because they often face discrimination on top of their mental health issues, and their voices are really important.”
A ‘beautiful model’
Architect, Projects Office, had also created what James Leadbitter dubbed “a beautiful little model, down the centre of which was a town square, a bakery, a social area, studios, ‘individualised bedrooms’, treehouses, and ‘all kinds of stuff’”. He explained: “We displayed our research and this model, sharing the voices of the people we’d heard from. We also asked service-users to describe their ‘perfect day’ in a mental health hospital, and made up storyboards, based on the ideas of those who had been in inpatient units for anything from a few weeks to decades.”
Great Ormond Street project Turning to the to the ‘Oh My GOSH, You’re Wellcome Kitten’ project, he explained that this had been a commission for the Wellcome Collection, and as part of it, he had spent six months going into Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children about twice a week, working with a group of eight-to-12-year-old inpatients. He said: “The hospital’s inpatient units are really well run, and time was our friend here. But how could we
We asked service-users to describe their ‘perfect day’ in a mental health hospital, and made up storyboards, based on the ideas of those who had been in inpatient units for anything from a few weeks to decades
engage the children in an art project?” The answer was to get them to ‘critique’ the existing environment. James Leadbitter said: “So we asked them to stick Post-It notes all over the unit to tell us what they didn’t like – such as a picture frame with no picture, some food preparation apparatus being really noisy, even distressing – especially for service-users on the autistic spectrum.
“Other things they told us,” he continued, “included ‘There’s no privacy’. ‘I’d like a swimming pool’, and ‘The roof is really low’; it makes it feel claustrophobic’. So,” he told delegates, “when you begin to design something, go and talk to the experts – the children; they’re smart. They know what the problem is, and they’ll tell you; you just need to figure out how to get them to.” Continuing to describe the work on the ‘Oh My GOSH, You’re Wellcome Kitten’ project, James Leadbitter explained that he and his team created the children involved an art studio from space provided by the hospital. He explained: “The children could do what they wanted there, within the bounds of safety. We asked them: ‘When you look out the window, what do you want to see; you’re in central London?’ We then gave them some pens so they could draw their ideas. The youngsters really took ownership of the space. We also asked them questions such as ‘Which smell might make you feel calm?’, and bought a load of French soap and asked them to smell it, and indeed to smear it all over the walls to make them feel calm.”
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