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Creating a Healing Campus: Challenging the Perceptions of Mental Illness

Nick Rowe

• 25 September 2015
  6.50pm-7.10pm

• York Medical Society (map)
  
  

• FREE admission
  No booking required

• Wheelchair accessible

  (through garden)

Event details

On one side of a road in York lies Bootham Park Hospital, formally York Lunatic Asylum. Built in 1777, today the hospital provides mental health services for York residents. In common with most, if not all, mental hospitals, Bootham Hospital once inspired fear; it was separated from the rest of the community by walls, some of which still remain. Institutions define identities: in the case of the psychiatric hospital identity can be, in Goffman’s (1968) term, ‘spoiled’ by stigma and over-identification with the diagnosis. Universities call for very different selves: aspirational, hopeful and focused on personal and professional development. The former confines, the latter seeks to liberate, but both are limited by their lack of contact with each other.

The aim of Converge is to harness the university’s knowledge, expertise, good will and forward-looking energy for the benefit of local people who use mental health services. The benefit is reciprocal: students and staff benefit as much as our visitors. What distinguishes Converge is that it offers a model of collaboration between a university and a mental health service provider that can make a real difference in the lives of users of mental health services, full-time students and the university community. Each can learn from the other. It matches the ‘core business’ of its key providers: the university educates its students; the health service has a valuable provision for its clients; and students complete their modules. Our aim quite simply is to create a healing campus.