2015 DIMH Awards Dinner
Celebrating creativity, imagination, and design
The 2015 Design in Mental Health Dinner & Awards were held at the National Motorcycle Museum on 19 May, during this year’s Design in Mental Health conference and exhibition. The evening provided a chance to relax, unwind, and make and renew contacts, and saw the presentation of the 2015 DIMH Awards. Guests were also treated to a thought-provoking after-dinner speech by author, campaigner, columnist, and mental health service-user, Clare Allan. The Network editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.
Hosting the Awards Dinner, which was held in the Imperial Suite at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull, was DIMHN chair, Jenny Gill. After welcoming the evening’s 230 guests, she explained that prior to the awards’ presentation, Clare Allan, a writer, author, and mental health columnist, and a former service-user, would speak. Clare Allan’s first novel, Poppy Shakespeare, was published in 2006 to widespread critical acclaim, and later adapted into a BAFTA- winning television screenplay. Her second book, Everything is Full of Dogs, will be published in 2016. She has also published extensively in The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The New York Times, and The Independent, and lectures in creative writing at London’s City University.
A TREMENDOUS IMPRESSION In beginning her address, she said: “I remember really enjoying this conference last year; it made a tremendous impression how much thought, care, empathy, and creativity, go into designing positive healthcare settings. I have been on a few wards myself, and have thus experienced the shift from rooms with multiple beds – I was once woken in the middle of the night by a disoriented patient emptying an ashtray over my head – to single rooms with their own en suite shower, in itself a tremendous step forward in terms of providing an environment with therapeutic potential. Of course there is far more to it than that, and at last year’s event I learnt a great deal more.” Clare Allan went on to cover some of her own experiences in mental healthcare inpatient accommodation – ‘good and bad’ – and emphasised her view that every encounter with the mental healthcare ‘system’, whether with professionals such as psychiatrists, clinicians and nurses, or with buildings – left an indelible impression.
time. I am not suggesting that every encounter will have quite such a life-transforming impact. It’s very often apparent that the significance of meetings – whether of individuals with each other, or with buildings – only becomes apparent in retrospect. Meetings are, however, creative – ideas breed ideas. Together we can achieve far more than via the sum of what we can do individually, but we need to come together and collaborate. That’s why the Design in Mental Health conference is such an exciting event – because in mixing together people from different worlds, with different experience and expertise, but a common goal – to help create inspiring, therapeutic, and affirming environments for those experiencing mental distress – it works like a giant pollinating brush when growing plants, and who knows what the fruits will be?”
Clare Allan, this year’s after-dinner speaker, read an extract from her first novel, Poppy Shakespeare, and described some of her own experience of mental healthcare facilities.
DEAD PLANT IN THE CORNER She said: “I once spent 18 months in a day hospital, from 9.00-4.30, five days a week, smoking and drinking tea, in a room with a dead plant in the corner, and a broken clock on the wall. Every few months I would be called into another room, where a panel of doctors and nurses, students, and anyone else who fancied a laugh, would fire questions at me, and debate why I hadn’t got better. After 18 months they gave me a new diagnosis and kicked me out. What’s striking, looking back, was their refusal to look at the whole situation. Of course I was a major part of the problem. ‘But’, I used to say to the staff, ‘look around you at the environment here – is it likely to help anyone recover?’”
EXTRACT FROM FIRST NOVEL Alluding to her first novel, Poppy Shakespeare, she read an extract describing the first, emotionally charged, meeting between two adult female service-users in a mental healthcare facility. She said afterwards: “This encounter will change the lives of both characters, ‘N’, and Poppy, for ever, although neither know it at the
AWARD JUDGES THANKED After the speech, the proceedings turned to the presentation of the 2015 DIMH Awards. Thanking this year’s judges for their ‘time, effort, and expertise’, Jenny Gill explained that awards would be presented in five categories – Product Innovation of the Year, Service User Experience, Project of the Year, Services to Mental Health, and Design Champion.
‘MEDIA WALL’ RECOGNISED The first award, ‘Product Innovation of the Year 2015’, supported by Mental Health Practice, went to Dutch company Recornect, for its Cowall, and was presented by Colin Parish, editor of Mental Health Practice, to one of Recornect’s founding partners, Cor Datema. The Cowall is a ‘media wall’ being targeted currently at use in bedrooms, comfort rooms, and seclusion suites within mental healthcare facilities. It offers service-users a wealth of ‘interactive’ functions – from the ability to view television, video, and other multimedia content, and to communicate via social media, to facilities for drawing, completing puzzles, viewing photographs, and finding out more
‘I remember really enjoying this conference last year; it made a tremendous impression how much thought, care, empathy, and creativity, go into designing positive healthcare settings’
THE NETWORK J u l y 2 0 1 5 9
Photo courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing.
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