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Christmas was not always great for Florence Nightingale, the pioneer of nursing and so many other public health works. In this bicentenary year of her birth in 1820, we head towards an insecure and problematic Yuletide, unsure who will pull our crackers (after sanitising!).

As a peer support worker, it’s been pretty much business as usual during Covid 19 – except for the obvious PPE and social distancing! So no goodbye hugs with patients as they leave, just an elbow touch and a smile behind my mask.

The theme of the third blog, in a series from our Public Involvement coordinator and a member of our Advisory board, is 'post pandemic' and the blog addresses how we will learn from our experiences. World Mental Health Day 2020 is on the 10th October. Days, weeks, months and awareness thereof have always been a complicated issue for me. On the one hand, without many an awareness ‘day’, ‘week’ or ‘month’ I would not be as educated on topics as I am. 

During our time of being physically distant from the Institute, our Public Involvement Coordinator, and a member of our Advisory Board, have begun producing a series of blogs. They felt felt it would be a great opportunity to invite you to read about a single topic from their individual perspectives. This is the second blog in the series, this time written by a member of our Advisory Board, the theme of this blog is: 'post pandemic' what comes next?

During our time of being physically distant from the Institute, both myself, and a member of our Advisory Board, will be producing a series of blogs. We felt it would be a great opportunity to invite you to read about a single topic from our individual perspectives. We chose our first topic of ‘honesty’ because it is something which is incredibly important to both of us and when talking about our experiences, it became clear we had some completely different, and some very similar, experiences; good and bad.

So, the saying goes, we should all be looking at what’s on the inside, not making decisions based on someone’s outward appearance, but understanding what’s on the inside is complicated and grows throughout a lifetime. Outrage from around the world in the past few weeks would tell us that we don’t do that.

Me, anxiety and a PhD. I wish I had a space to share. As I await my PhD viva, I am as anxious as can be for reasons that I cannot explain, because up until a few weeks ago, I was still checking my email several times a day to see if a viva date has been set, so anyone would think that finally knowing the date and time will comfort my anxious nerves. It did not. 

Today sees my 14th day working from home and the second week for my other half who can’t work from home as he is a painter and decorator. However, the big bonus is I am getting my house decorated. Always a silver lining. So far, we are both safe and well and enjoying exploring being together 24 hours a day. With our busy lives we can often be so tired that relationships become difficult because you don’t communicate. I know when I have been dashing about doing work and Badminton, going to the gym etc. I am often so exhausted that I just fall asleep after tea, then wake up and go to bed, leaving my partner alone downstairs.

Sitting down to write any blog can be difficult, this blog on honesty, in the area of research, was quite daunting, not knowing who exactly my audience will be. I just want to give a little insight on a lay person’s view of being involved in research and how being honest with them can certainly improve the outcomes. All that I write comes from my own opinions and experiences.

Integrating Care: Finding Commonality Between Organisations to Implement Best Practise Neil Chadborn, Zvezdan Bozinovski Photography. Neil Chadborn’s research focuses on inter-professional and inter-organisational aspects of integrated care for older people. He is currently involved in the PEACH project, to understand how a Quality Improvement Collaborative (QIC) can help organise healthcare services in care homes – and has an Alzheimer’s Society Knowledge Exchange Fellowship, exploring how services within a community can work together and with people living with dementia. We talked to him about the challenges of providing truly integrated care and why networks may provide a more inclusive way to enable people to access support according to their needs.

Commentary written by professor Peter Bartlett Sec State (Justice) v MM; Welsh Ministers v PJ, [2017] EWCA Civ 194 This was the conjoined appeal of two cases, concerning ostensibly similar programmes regarding release from hospital of people with mental health problems who require continued care in the community. MM concerned conditional discharge under section 73.[1]  This mechanism affects people detained through the criminal provisions of the MHA (‘Part III patients’) who are subject to a ‘restriction order’ (s 41) – that is, they can only be released by the Secretary of State or, as in this case, a review tribunal.  A conditional discharge may be made when the tribunal considers that the criteria for ongoing psychiatric detention are no longer met, but where it considers that appropriate that should remain liable to be recalled for further treatment.  As the name suggests, the order allows conditions to be placed on discharge – typically determining where the individual will live, that he or she will comply with prescribed treatment, what medical supervision he or she will receive, that he or she will refrain from use of alcohol or drugs, and sometimes that he or she will not meet with former associates, or not go into particular geographic areas (eg., not near the home of a former victim, or not to go near schools, if the index offences involved children).

Interview and commentary from Mercè Santos Mir. Every year #MentalHealthAwareness day steps into the limelight for its annual day of recognition, but has  it ever truly left? Mental health awareness is increasingly becoming a daily conversation between friends, family, colleagues and health service providers across the country and abroad – breaking down a little piece of the taboo topic each and every time we discuss anxiety, depression, schizophrenia and all the other conditions that fall under the mental health umbrella. We caught up with our Exhibitions Curator at the Institute of Mental Health , Mercè Santos Mir, who has worked closely with artists who deal with issues of mental health within their practice, who put theirs and others' inner-experiences on canvas for all to see, to raise awareness and break down the barriers we face in the introverted dark of battling against a mental health condition.

Dear reader, As 2018 draws to a close we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support.  We've had some great content this year and as always it's been a privilege to be able to host the research, experience and opinions of our wonderful collaborators & contributors. We hope you have a brilliant festive season and look forward to sharing new content with you in January.

A blog by Elvira Perez Vallejos, Associate Professor of Digital Mental Health, Mental Health and Technology theme. I recently attended a workshop at the Royal College of Psychiatrists to discuss and reflect on the impact of digital technology on the future of mental healthcare. This workshop was part of the Topol review which is aiming at preparing the NHS healthcare workforce to embrace current and future digital developments for mental healthcare.

This longitudinal study of American teenagers by Ra and colleagues, sought to explore the association between digital media use and symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), as well as explore the relationship between high frequency digital media use and ADHD symptom severity. The study is topical as all parents worry about the relative amount of screen time versus green time that their children engage in, however on the basis of this study should we be concerned about the relationship between digital media use and an enhanced risk of later ADHD?

It’s really important that we as service users and patients can talk about service experiences, share common ground and negotiate service improvements together. This, to me, is the essence of co-production: making meaningful change together. However, to do this well takes time and effort all round. Co-production isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, a tick box exercise and whilst it may add more time onto a project, the outcome of a better fit-for-purpose service is worth the effort.Often there is a lack of time for people implementing new changes to circulate information about involvement opportunities. True co-production takes time, detailed conversations, time to ‘think’ (often left out of NHS change projects) and just general involvement and communication.

We all want gold standard care for all our patients –right? We want the best for people. So if we unpick that assumption a little further what should gold standard look like? Often when such questions are asked you need to read a long diatribe of words to get to the point. Not in this case. In this case, it’s simple – Trauma informed care. Here’s a fact to kick us off; - “Notably, people in contact with mental health services who have been sexually or physically abused in childhood typically have longer and more frequent hospital admissions, are prescribed more medication, are more likely to self-harm and are more likely to attempt to kill themselves than people without experiences of childhood abuse” (Read et al., 2007). This one fact alone should be enough to make us all stop and question what we do and how we do it, after all everyone want to reduce admissions in this day and age of cutbacks.

Recently, the British Society of Gerontology held a joint meeting for two Special Interest Groups; ‘Educational Gerontology’ and ‘Technology and Ageing’. The event was organised to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the commission on Adult Education. Sharon Clancy kicked off the event with a presentation: ‘Celebrating adult education – 100th anniversary of the commission’. This was about the 1919 commission on adult education which was part of the reconstruction after World War 1, aiming to support education of the population who had recently been given the right to vote. The commission called for education ‘throughout the life of the adult’. Sharon noted that the commission reflected the changing nature of work and had a ‘civic rhetoric’.

A new innovative group called the ‘Association of Mental Health Peer Researchers’ was launched on World Mental Health Day 2019. The aim of this collective is to bring together people with lived experience of mental health issues, who are doing mental health research, across the University. The official launch was attended by our key allies from different Schools and research groups, with the aim of informing them about our work so that they can support us and sign-post potential members. Following an endorsement from the Institute of Mental Health’s Director, Prof. Martin Orrell, the aims and objectives of the group were outlined (see below), and then two of our members showcased their research: Minh Dang spoke about her ongoing PhD work on the wellbeing of survivors of modern slavery, and Stefan Rennick-Egglestone shared about how peer researchers are involved in the Narrative Experiences Online (NEON) study. There was a buzz about the whole event, and people were excited about our vision for our work going forward.

“You can’t go back and change the beginning but you can start where you are and change the end.” CS Lewis The 7th November 2019 marks 4 years for me as a peer support worker. It is something of a miracle. I had completed the accredited peer support training in the summer of 2015, when my bed was still warm from being detained on a section 2, where I also detoxed from alcohol. Then it was time to apply for a role, after a year of no work following redundancy, I got the job. I remember being pleased, amazed and somewhat shocked but had felt that finally I had hope and direction. So, I had a start date of 7th October, but as the day approached I became scared and anxious and my inner critic told me, quite clearly, that I wouldn’t be able to do the job, that I was useless and that it would be better if I just gave up and lost everything. I self-harmed and cried, not knowing what to do. Eventually, I called the peer support lead and told her that I couldn’t do the job. I expected her to graciously accept the fact that I wouldn’t be doing the role – but instead she just said: “well leave it a month and see how you feel next month?” I couldn’t quite believe it but accepted her offer and took a further month to regroup and decide that perhaps, maybe I could do the job.