3. "What leads to innovation in mental healthcare? Reflections on clinical expertise in a bureaucratic age"
An important new article in the Psychiatric Bulletin by anthropologist Neil Armstrong, based on a Phoenix Unit Witness Seminar hosted and recorded by the Archive and Study Centre in October 2016:
The Phoenix Unit was an acute admissions ward run according to the therapeutic community concept at the Littlemore Hospital in Oxford. It was set up by Bertram Mandelbrote in 1959 and closed in 1996. The ethos of the Phoenix was to explore the behaviours and feelings of residents through community life and, in particular, in group settings. Daily community groups formed the centre of care and were supplemented by working groups, occupational therapy, crisis groups and relatives' groups.
The Archive recorded and transcribed the six group sessions. "There were 23 participants, including psychiatrists, nurses, a psychologist, a social worker, an occupational therapist and an art therapist." In the four pages of the article a great deal of ground is covered, and just one among the questions raised is "Do we undervalue expertise by experience because of quite recent changes in how we understand the nature of expertise itself?"
In other words, have generations raised in a culture of accountability in which "Quantification is a way of making decisions without seeming to decide" lost the capacity to see and therefore trust and listen to, and learn from, the expertise of experience? And if so, is what is offered by PETT in the Archive and Study Centre - in Witness Seminars and Archive Weekends, in the materials it holds and its philosophy of engaged and supportive archives and oral history - a corrective? Or are we all swimming against an inevitable sea?
Neil Armstrong, Lecturer in Anthropology, Magdalen College, University of Oxford: "What leads to innovation in mental healthcare? Reflections on clinical expertise in a bureaucratic age", CLICK HERE.
