Promoting MH, reslience and wellbeing through Open Dialogue in Nottingham.

[Jill Anderson]

The Open Futures Network is service user and community led, bringing together local groups and local services, artists, activists, health care professionals and academics within collaborative and dynamic partnerships for well-being.  It also forms the tenth integrated research group in the new Centre for Social Futures at the Institute of Mental Health in Nottingham.  As such, Open Futures creates a precedent in being driven from within by the voices of lived experience.

The Open Futures Network seeks to promote mental health, resilience and wellbeing by exploring an Open Dialogue approach in the field of mental health and also within wider society. The Open Dialogue vision offers huge potential for improvements in service development and delivery and for more humane and compassionate relationships in society at large. Through modelling the principles of Open Dialogue, the Network aims to:

• Reframe power.
• Orchestrate polyphony.
• Accommodate uncertainty.
• Navigate divergence.
• Liberate dialogue.
• Explore boundaries.
• Celebrate difference.

The network leads are Caroline Fox and Julie Gosling, who are working with clinical psychologist lead Steven Coles. Open Futures remains open to new members and partnerships with a strong commitment to include the least well heard voices as active informants and collaborators.

Open Futures commits to the aims and activities of the Institute of Mental Health in the confidence that by honouring narratives of lived experience, we will discover together a liberating vision of wellbeing and the compassionate spaces that enable it.

Visit the website.