Beginning in Spring of 2021 I’m spending time with young people who are inpatient at the Coborn Centre for Adolescent Mental Health, which is part of the Newham Centre for Mental Health. Coborn is an intensive care and acute care hospital, so the young people are having a tough time.
It’s almost exactly 20 years since I was discharged from a adolescent mental health hospital myself, so I’m super keen to spend sometime with these young people to find out how things are for them. This is obviously with the knowledge that demands for mental health services by young people has gone up a lot since I was in hospital. With the addition of the Covid 19 pandemic and the effects of lockdown on young people, the focus of this process will be around the question of ‘Why are so many young people struggling with their mental health?’. What do the young people think are the answers to this? I’m hoping we can explore this question through making a short film together, though that could change – as is the nature of these kind of processes.
This project fits in with a wider range of work am doing around health, covid, mental health and who leads of the design and delivery of care in both Newham and young peoples mental health more widely. For example through my project EXPOSURE or Barmy Army.
I hope that it will be “messy, weird, from the heart, angry, honest, tender, fragile, complex, about mental health or not about mental health, urgent, necessary, and silly”. Lets see.
The project has been commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery.
In collaboration with Caroline Moore.
Produced by Angie Robinson for Madlove Ltd.
Supported by the #iwill Fund