Good Practice for Participatory Work
Some things to consider when creating
mental health themed artistic work with
a group of participants.
As part of our Performing Anxiety project we are developing a good practice guide for making creative work about mental health, drawing on conversations with over 30 writers, performers, directors, producers and programmers who have professional experience in this field.
We are updating these guidelines in response to feedback, so that this resource can evolve as we continue to learn. If there are things you think we’ve missed – or that we’ve got wrong – contact Andrew Eaton-Lewis at smhaf@mentalhealth.org.uk.
Are you ready?
Have you considered all the access needs of your participants? Is the space, and time (time of day, length of event), fully accessible not just practically in terms of wheelchair access etc but in terms of participants feeling at home and at ease? Do you have a budget for travel, food and drink, and childcare? Have you considered the impact of threshold anxiety on people’s willingness to enter spaces associated with the arts?
We realised that getting performances happening in community centres and in religious centres and spaces outside of the city centre, where communities live, was really critical.
Sabra Khan, producer, BEDLAM Festival
Do you have appropriate mental health professionals in the room?
Do you have the necessary skills to hold a space with vulnerable people? If not, are you working with support workers, therapists, or wellbeing practitioners?
Is your consent form fit for purpose?
A consent form will clearly outline how material created during the project will be used, who will see it, what will happen to it afterwards, how long it will stay in the public domain, whether or not participants will be identified etc. Are you being clear with participants about how will use the material, and what control they will have over it at every stage of the process?
Remember that consent is ongoing, not static.
It is good practice to allow participants to withdraw material, or decline to perform their work, at any stage in the process. Also, if you are encouraging someone to share mental health related material with an audience, have you discussed with them how this might be received by people they know – loved ones, family members – and do they understand the implications? You might want to consider renewed consent, which allows you to use material only for a limited, mutually agreed time, or limited consent, where people’s real names or photographs aren’t used, or where nothing appears online.
How adaptable is your artform?
Several interviewees told us that projects in which participants could choose the artform themselves during the process had better levels of engagement. Are you willing and able to adapt what you want to do in response to participants? Do participants have the freedom to express themselves through whatever artform works best for them? Adapting the way you present work to accommodate the mental health needs of individual participants is not a compromise; in fact, if done innovatively, it can lead to stronger artistic work.
And so we then discovered these additional ways of being able to work with vulnerable people, with complex mental health needs, that kept them not only safe, but also created this extraordinary feeling of freedom and self-expression in that safety.
Mariem Omari, writer & producer
All layers of involvement are valuable.
Try not to see someone’s reluctance to fully engage in a process as an obstacle. If they need to wear headphones or regularly check their phones, for example, or if they can only be involved intermittently or for a short time, work with that. If they want to listen but not talk, work with that. All levels of engagement are valid and will bring something extra to the project. And if you can meet people half way they may then grow in confidence and participate more.
Are you setting clear boundaries when sharing information?
If you’re bringing material into the room that is distressing, then we need to be really mindful of that material. And that means I might say, ‘I don’t think you should share this,’ not because I’m censoring you, but because we need to do a lot of work to keep you safe because the sharing of that material will be really challenging for you and an audience, so how do we support you to share that story?
James Leadbitter, artist & mental health activist
Mental health aesthetics are different.
Wellbeing should also be factored into the structure of how work is presented.
Often you put the most challenging material in the middle. It kind of goes counter to how traditional narrative works, normally you put your best material at the end, and the second best material at the beginning, and it doesn’t really matter what you put in the middle; we’re going, ‘let’s put all the best material in the middle so that we can put something at the end to cushion how you’re leaving that space.’
James Leadbitter, artist & mental health activist
Performing Anxiety
A resource for people who want to make audience-facing or participatory arts projects about mental health.
