Mental Health & the Arts is a new interdisciplinary, cross-border initiative on the island of Ireland, founded and directed by Dr Noreen Giffney, Dr Maggie Long and Dr Jolene Mairs Dyer. Each of us has undergone practitioner training for working with people experiencing mental health difficulties: psychoanalytic psychotherapy, counselling or mental health social work. We also have a personal and professional interest in the arts and culture, and are academic lecturers and researchers in the School of Communication & Media at Ulster University in Northern Ireland. We are committed to considering what can happen in the gaps, overlaps and disjunctions between different disciplines, approaches, practices and locations. Events bring together people from the creative and performing arts and practitioners from mental health and healthcare more generally, to facilitate public conversations about psychosocial topics of interest to communities in the North and South of Ireland.The initiative explores ways to facilitate us having conversations about matters that can be difficult and might sometimes be unspeakable or unthinkable. Each event involves us partnering with an arts or community organisation and focuses on a topic relevant to both the arts and mental and/or physical health in order to help open up a space for thinking and reflection.
Our first event on "The Long-Term Impact of Childhood Trauma on Adult Mental and Physical Health" took place on Friday 12 October 2018 in the Strand Arts Centre Cinema in Belfast. The event was co-sponsored by the Centre for Media Research at Ulster University and the Belfast Film Festival. It was awarded 3.5 continuing professional development (CPD) points by the Psychoanalytic Section of the Irish Council for Psychotherapy (ICP). The event featured a screening of the documentary film, "Resilience" (dir. James Redford 2016), after which there were a series of responses by professionals working in the fields of counselling, psychotherapy, physiotherapy, general medicine, social work, and documentary filmmaking. Speakers at the event included Dr Olive Buckley OBE, Dr Noreen Giffney, Ms Lynda Graham, Dr Maggie Long, Mr Michael McGibbon, Dr Jolene Mairs Dyer and Mr Christian van der Merwe.
Our second event on "What Can We Do with Our Vulnerability? Writing and Reading for Healing from Trauma" took place on Friday 25 October 2019 in The Duncairn, a community arts centre, in Belfast. The event was co-sponsored by Counselling and Health Communication at Ulster University (@UlsterCHC) and the Verbal Arts Centre in Derry~Londonderry. We were delighted to welcome award-winning writer and Professor Emilie Pine to discuss her bestselling book of personal essays, "Notes to Self" (Dublin: Tramp Press 2018; London: Penguin 2019). The event featured opening remarks by Dr Maggie Long, a reading from "Notes to Self" by Professor Emilie Pine, and a public interview with Emilie conducted by Dr Noreen Giffney and Dr Jolene Mairs Dyer. Facilitators from Verbal's Reading Rooms Project facilitated small-group discussions of selected passages from "Notes to Self".
To join the mailing list, email n.giffney@ulster.ac.uk, m.long@ulster.ac.uk, j.mairs-dyer@ulster.ac.uk
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