How do art therapists interact with people and their artworks in a mentalization-based art therapy group?

Art therapy research studies neglect the description of practice. A literature review revealed that art therapists narrowly rely on self-reported case studies to build theory, but that approach tends to result in a description of the therapist's intention rather than the actions they undertook. Comparable forms of psychological therapy have constructed descriptions of practice from observational research but this method has been relatively underused by art therapists. The present study used observation to build a description of practice of how art therapists interacted with service users and their artworks in a mentalization-based art therapy group for people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Three fifteen minute video edited sequences of in vivo art therapy sessions were viewed by focus groups who described what they observed. Because the study assumed a social constructionist epistemology, focus groups were chosen to represent a range of service users, psychological therapists, art therapists and the treating art therapists' perspectives. A modified grounded theory approach was used to analyse transcripts from those focus groups which resulted in two core conceptual categories. The first proposed that when art therapists demonstrated their engaged attention, it supported a more reliable therapeutic interaction. The second, conversely, proposed that when the art therapists gave the appearance of passivity, it exacerbated dismissive interactions between group members and with artworks. This added new theoretical concepts to art therapy group literature. However, that theory was not tested in the present study

Observing mentalizing art therapy groups for people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder

This article describes video-based observation of three mentalization-based treatment (MBT) art therapy groups in services for people who have received a diagnosis of personality disorder.Four focus groups (service user researchers, MBT trained psychologists, MBT trained art therapists, and the three art therapists who submitted videos) developed descriptions of the practice they observed on video. A grounded theory method was used to develop a proposition that if the art therapist uses art to demonstrate their attention, this tends to help potentially chaotic and dismissive groups to cooperate, whereas if the art therapist gives the appearance of passivity, it tends to increase the problematic interactions in the group

Processes in an experience-based co-design project with family carers in community mental health

Experience-based co-design (EBCD) is a service design strategy that facilitates collaborative work between professional staff and service users toward common goals. There is a lack of published examples of it in relation to family carer engagement within a mental health context, and little research exploring the mechanisms behind successful implementation. The aim of this study was to explore the processes that facilitated EBCD with carer involvement. The study adopted a grounded theory–informed approach involving interviews with 16 participants of an existing EBCD project in an English National Health Service (NHS) trust, reflecting multiple stakeholders. EBCD can be thrown off track in two ways: conflict and getting “bogged down.” Leadership by project and design-group leaders could return group cohesion and maintain project momentum. The developed model reflects key processes. Future research should examine EBCD projects with similar ranges of stakeholders and in contexts with different levels of organizational change

The Tetley feast

The Tetley Feast was a community-engaged, participatory design project between academics, students and local community organisations, that occurred within a host centre, The Tetley, which had just opened as a new contemporary arts centre in Leeds, North England. It involved 70 undergraduate BA (hons.) Visual Communication students from the University working with a range of local community organisations which were economically and culturally deprived, as well as being, in the main, excluded from design practices and education. As part of the conference Cumulus Johannesburg, Design with the Other 90%, the paper is regional in focus but framed against the context of current global inequality. This project sought to promote engagement between design students and communities that would lead to sustainable long-term relationships. It was important that these were dialogic and people created learning opportunities together, that is students learned from the communities and vice versa. Participating organisations included: schools and alternative education providers; an Asian health centre; a youth club; a group of adults with learning and physical disabilities; a single dads’ group and a mental health organisation working with women from the Polish and Bangladeshi communities. This paper reports on a case study that encompasses methods of design as social practice and participatory action research. The project culminated in a temporary exhibition at The Tetley with a range of work made by students with different levels of collaboration with community participants. These included films, photography, graphic design, craft, installations, outcomes of workshops run by students and interactive workshops. Over 200 participants from the community groups attended and took part in the event, inspired by the Hunslet Feast, a local community festival that took place over 100 years ago

Identifying readiness to train: when to push and when to pull

Monitoring training load – and in particular an athlete’s ability to cope with it – is now common practice; often the data is used to define an athlete’s ‘readiness’ to train. The aim of this monitoring is to identify when athletes should be rested, when they can train as per normal, and when they can have their training load ramped up. Crudely put, this monitoring provides a ‘push or pull’ diagnosis to each athlete’s training day. In this context, push defines an increase in training load, whereas pull refers to a reduction in training load. Although the idea of implementing this is generally well accepted, the statistical approach to identifying the point of push or pull seems unstandardised and – anecdotally – varies from club to club. Therefore, presenting methods to analyse the data in this regard will be the aim of this paper. The reader can then apply justifiable and sensitive methods of data analysis to their morning measures of fatigue, such that the subsequent training session can be appropriately altered

Using experience-based co-design to improve inpatient mental health spaces

Inpatient services are frequently constructed as a topic of concern in research and policy, often in response to service-users’ reports that wards are unsafe, boring, and lacking in amenities (Quirk & Lelliott, 2001). Our research shows that service-users, as well as staff and families, experience inpatient mental health spaces as impermeable, separate and stigmatising, and sometimes uncomfortable, chaotic and unsafe (Fenton et al., 2014; Hickman et al., 2015). Experience-based co-design (EBCD; Bate & Robert, 2007) is a participatory action research approach to service development, which has been used extensively in physical healthcare (Donetto, Tsianakas & Robert, 2014), but is only recently being used to improve mental health services (Larkin, Boden & Newton, 2014). This chapter will draw on EBCD projects from two NHS Mental Health Trusts. These projects brought together service-users, staff and families, alongside Trust management and community staff to co-design improvements to the inpatient wards. Sometimes these improvements were as simple as introducing soft furnishings and better signage, sometimes they were more complex interventions in the culture of the wards, however all the improvements, and perhaps more importantly, the improvement process, allowed service-users and families to feel more welcomed and comforted, and helped staff working in difficult circumstances feel more supported