Mind: You’re Language

Description

This is a collaboration between visual artist Patrick Murphy, writer and broadcaster Ian McMillan, academic Chris Blackmore and researcher, creative practitioner and Sheffield Flourish associate Shirin Teifouri. The aim of the project is to examine the language of mental health and how this has changed, and continues to change, over time. This builds on the research interest of Dr Blackmore in the narratives of people with lived experience of mental health problems.

The team has worked with source material including historical records from the South Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum (Later Middlewood Hospital, Sheffield), 1872 – 1996, and present-day recorded interviews with members of Sheffield Flourish, a mental health charity based in the city, about their lived experience of mental health challenges and how they live with them today. 

What can we learn from voices of the past about how ideas and language of mental health have changed? What do contemporary stories of lived experience voices tell us about mental health today? And what can be done now to help those living with mental illness and distress?  

The result of the ‘Mind: You’re Language’ project is a creative imagining of the dialogue between past and present, in the form of an exhibition, a public talk and a book created by Patrick and Ian.