Designing better mental healthcare facilities

Listening to service-users is imperative with design

The Design in Mental Health Network has always recognised the value of hearing from serviceusers on their experiences in a variety of mental healthcare settings – something reflected in a number of presentations at last August’s DiMH 2021 conference

One of the speakers with forthright views on how the physical environment in inpatient mental health settings, and the way those with mental health issues are perceived and treated, could be improved, is artist and speaker, James Leadbitter, alias ‘the vacuum cleaner’, who gave a thought-provoking presentation. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

‘The vacuum cleaner’ is the ‘alias’ of UKbased artist, James Leadbitter, who ‘makes candid, provocative, and playful art about the world being messed up’. Drawing on his own experience of mental ill health, he works with young people, healthcare professionals, and vulnerable adults, ‘to challenge how mental health is understood, treated, and experienced.’ As he puts it, he ‘wants to find better ways to go mad’. ‘With roots in activism and radical art’, he has created both ‘one-man interventions’, and ‘large-scale actions’, as well as performance, installation, and film, with his work shown in galleries, theatres, hospitals, and schools, and appearing on streets and in public spaces internationally.

A DiMH 2021 award-winner

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