CHAD is committed to carrying out research that is locally relevant and accessible. The purpose of our seminar series is to share local research with a wide audience in order to stimulate discussion and debate. This includes practitioners, service providers, voluntary and community groups and other academics – everyone is welcome.
The seminar on Mental Health was the second CHAD seminar of 2016. This took place on Wednesday the 23rd November, covering two interesting topics, ‘Suicide and Bi-polar’ and ‘Books, meaning and hope’. 25 attended the seminar with a good mixture of internal and external people.
Suicide and Bi-polar
The first speaker Dr Rob Dempsey is a Lecturer in Psychology at Staffordshire University and co-director of the Staffordshire Centre for Psychological Research. He gave an interesting overview of Suicide and Bi-polar.
Rob presented findings from an ongoing series of work investigating the role of psychosocial predictors of suicidality amongst individuals with a bipolar disorder diagnosis, e.g., appraisals of defeat and entrapment.
The presentation can be downloaded here.
Books, meaning and hope
The second topic ‘Books, meaning and hope: use of co-produced groups in South Staffordshire community mental health services’ was presented by Dr. Joy Thorneycroft and Dr. David Dobel-Ober.
Joy was a service user and former GP, when she came together with other service users and health professionals to help set up and run a book club. The club aimed to support other people whose experience, like hers, had a massive impact on their family and professional life. Joy published an article about her experience, its impact on her own mental health and journey towards recovery. She subsequently joined the research department at SSSFT NHS Healthcare and worked with David on the evaluation of other co-produced groups in the Trust.
Their presentation described the journey and findings from the published evaluation, e.g., improvements in self-esteem, empowerment and purpose, and enabling recovery for service user co-producers.
The presentation can be downloaded here.
Following the presentations there was an opportunity to ask questions of the speakers. This stimulated interesting discussion and interaction between the speakers and audience.
The seminar was a great success and we look forward to next year’s seminar series. Look out for the programme which will be coming soon.
