Stopping seclusion from creating a lasting barrier

Giving a thought-provoking joint presentation at the Design in Mental Health 2022 Conference, Paula Reavey, Professor of Psychology and Mental Health at London South Bank University, and Steve Brown, Professor of Health and Organisational Psychology at Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, discussed a study examining the impact of the environment on serviceusers during periods of de-escalation and seclusion. The Network’s editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

Speaking as part of a session entitled ‘Safe and Balanced Environments’ on the morning of the conference’s first day, Professor Reavey explained that she and Professor Brown are part of a broader team of researchers ‘interested in the relationship between psychological states and environments’. For the past 20 years, Professor Reavey has conducted research in a variety of inpatient and community mental health settings – across general and secure psychiatric environments – working as part of interdisciplinary research and clinical groups with colleagues from across the world. She has published over 100 hundred articles and 10 books, and is the founder of the Design with People in Mind book series, on behalf of the DiMHN. A DiMHN Board Member, she leads the Network’s Research & Education Workstream. 

Professor Brown’s research interests, meanwhile, are around service-user experiences of secure mental healthcare, and ‘social remembering within marginalised and excluded groups’. He is the co-author (with Paula Reavey) of Vital Memory and Affect: Living with a difficult past (2015, Routledge), Psychology without Foundations: History, philosophy and psychosocial theory (with Paul Stenner, 2009, Sage), and The Social Psychology of Experience: Studies in remembering and forgetting (with David Middleton, 2005, Sage).