Can personal wellbeing improve when we start to focus on others’ wellbeing? Matthew Taylor describes a mental health project that put this to the test
Last year, as part of an EU funded arts and wellbeing project, Escape Artists, a London-based arts company, ran a series of creative workshops at Fulbourn Hospital in Cambridge. The workshops took place over a period of seven weeks and were based in the hospital’s out-patient unit. Participants were all mental health care service users who had been diagnosed as ‘complex cases’. Many had been in and out of hospital for a dozen years or more.
The workshops were led by Mary-Jane Stevens, a freelance arts practitioner with a background in drama. She was supported by other freelances with skills in photography, film-making and creative writing. A primary objective of the project was to build the confidence of the participants by gently persuading them to refocus, even if only temporarily, their attention from issues affecting personal wellbeing onto issues affecting group wellbeing. The reason for doing this is that it was thought that by focusing on group wellbeing, participants would find that their own sense of wellbeing would be improved: that in taking care of others they would find that their own cares might be diminished in intensity.
So the challenge for the workshop team was to come up with ways in which group solidarity and collective wellbeing could be encouraged while, at the same time, ensuring that vulnerable individuals weren’t pushed into areas of concern and responsibility that might trigger adverse reactions and withdrawal from the project.
After a number of meetings with hospital staff, it was decided that the issue of collective wellbeing would be best addressed through the creation of a fictional community. The participants would then be able to engage with the problems of the fictional community by taking on the roles of fictional characters within that community. This meant that all the issues that they were confronting would be, to some extent, de-personalised and thus rendered less threatening and more easily dealt with at a playfully conceptual level.
The creation of the fictional community began with participants spontaneously drawing all the elements of small town on a big sheet of paper placed on the floor. Within about 15 minutes the blank sheet was filled with a collectively drawn representation of a bustling town, complete with school, pub, police station, doctor’s surgery and even a rather dodgy nightclub.
Next came the invention of the characters that would be inhabiting, interacting and solving shared problems within, what had now become, Bless You Town. The workshop leaders were pleasantly surprised by how quickly the participants created new roles for themselves in their imagined space. The opportunity to play the part of someone else, much less troubled by mental health problems and much more engaged in a busy social life, had the effect of unlocking positive feelings that some said they hadn’t experienced in years.
At the end of the project, the feedback from the participants was universally positive, with them all electing to choose 'very successful' from the list of outcome descriptions. Over the duration of the workshops the participants all stated that their creative skills, their self confidence and their sense of wellbeing had improved.
Although the project only lasted a couple of months, it clearly adds weight to the argument that wellbeing is a collective enterprise that is dependent on active engagement in the social and environmental issues that effect us all. Subjective wellbeing is, in other words, a shared responsibility. A responsibility that we should, perhaps, all be paying more attention to.