Why do I come to MHHE?  Good question.  The truth is that I haven't really participated in MHHE in any consistent manner.  I dip in and out, depending on the things that come up on Jill's regular announcements.  Again, thanks to Jill, some of my own blogging about mental health in academia has been shared - though I have been very quiet on this front for a while.

It is partly an ambivalence about identification with the categories of 'mental health service user', 'depression', 'mad studies'.  Its just that these are just a small part of ME.  Having said that, they are also fundamental to how I orient to the world.  

And because of this, I have, tentatively, made some moves to more explicitly (apart from the relative safety of my blog), step out as somebody who associates personally and professionally with the field of mental health in higher education:

  • with a friend/colleague we are planning to start a 'mad film club' on campus as a space to raise issues, discuss in relative safety, have fun with folks interested in all things related to mental health (a term we have real trouble with), mental health services, mental health and academia.
  • the same friend encouraged me to participate in a project aiming to establish a community based hub/centre by and for people living with mental distress of different kinds that exists outside the normative mental health services - oh the anxiety of stepping outside my safe academic zone.
  • I am writing an academic article based on my personal experience of crisis and how it relates to the intensification of academic work.  I have discussed this with a trusted journal editor who is open to the content, and more importantly the style of writing that disrupts normative academic 'objectivity'. 
  • This article, I hope will form the basis for a research project working with others who have lived with mental crisis in higher education.

So, I think I will be a more regular visitor to MHHE.

Views: 28

Comment by Jill Anderson on April 11, 2016 at 10:00

Hi Simon.  Thanks so much for posting this, and apologies for delay in response.  I somehow missed it.  Would be really interested to hear more about the community based hub/centre as we have had discussions about something similar here in Lancaster.  The mad film club too. . . .  Does anyone else have experience of running film clubs I wonder?  There is an interesting article by Mick McKeown and colleagues here: http://mhhe.treelinesoftware.com/news-and-events/living-and-learnin...

Looking forward to further interaction here on the hub.

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