Links

'A Funny Farm' by Cooltan Arts aims to give a grassroots voice to those using or involved with mental health services providing each other with support, advice and sharing experiences, it will also be a creative place, where you can put drawings, paintings, photographs, creative writing, music and spoken word poetry.

US American website on former asylums.

Webpage by a group of political activists who set up their own peer-support network to deal with the psychological consequences of being politically active outside the parliamentary system. Problems described include the consequences of living class struggle and being exposed to attacks by police.

Asylum, the magazine was set up by a group of sufferers and professionals and much influenced by the “antipsychiatry” movement.
It describes itself as an international magazine for democratic psychiatry, psychology, education and community development.

A directory of former asylums in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, often with contacts to who holds the records now. It claims by no means to be complete, but it is a good start, especially for research on Welsh and English asylums.

BBC article from the year 2000 on the state of UK psychiatric hopsital care

News-orientated website aiming to be a portal for original news on mental health issues relevant to Black communities. BMH UK also provides general background information and initiates campaigns aiming to change things for the better.

ClearerChannel is an online video project which encourages viewers to download and transmit video for social change. Check out Videos listed by group or topics. Then - get involved. Use their training manuals to create video and retransmit it via email, your website, blogs, myspace, youtube...

Cooltan Arts exists to inspire the well-being and creative participation of a diverse range of people through the production of quality art.

Based in South London's lively Walworth Road they have three workshops and a gallery.

Creative Routes is an award-winning interdisciplinary arts charity, run by the mad for the mad. Creative Routes celebrates and promotes the unique creativity of mad people, promoting mental well-being, and creatively campaigning against discrimination and for the acceptance of individuality in society.

Current TV is an online and cable tv station, also streaming user created content. This link will take you to the producer's training section, with many useful tips and examples what makes a good short factual film.

Click on the folder labelled Broomhill Hospital to see the photos taken in November 2006 of the derelict hospital.

DIPEx shows you a wide variety of personal experiences of health and illness. You can watch, listen to or read their interviews, find reliable information on treatment choices and where to find support.

The site covers cancers, heart disease, mental health, neurological conditions, screening programmes, pregnancy, teenage health, chronic illnesses and many others.

Amongst all his graffiti and street art photography, Duncan finds time to document hospitals and former asylums in Scotland and elsewhere. The link will take you to a directory of relevant photo albums.
Duncan's photos were also part of the Testimony exhibition in Glasgow.

Glock Design drew up Testimony's logo and also developed the look and feel for this website.

Photos of the former West Park asylum by urban explorers.

The hospital/asylum section of Hidden Glasgow portrays local former asylums by showing urban explorer photos and a short description text. In the forums of the website you can find a lot more information by urban explorers who describe their visits and the state of the buildings throughout recent years.

a site dedicated to revealing the remains of England and Wales' local authority funded mental hospitals: resource for architectural, historical, comparative and social interest.

Inquest provides a specialist, comprehensive advice service to bereaved people, lawyers, other advice and support agencies, the media, MPs and the wider public on contentious deaths and their investigation.
Inquest's casework priorities are deaths in custody (police, prison, immigration detention and deaths of detained patients) and our focus on deaths in custody and the monitoring of such deaths means that we are at the forefront of uncovering patterns and trends.

Excellent resource on the state of race relations in the UK today. Regularly updated and has links to other websites. Information on Immigration, Refugees and Race.

Intute is a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research. The service is created by a network of UK universities and partners. Subject specialists select and evaluate the websites in our database and write high quality descriptions of the resources. The database contains 123058 records.

iPak is an auto-ethnographic and polyphonic narrative responding to scientific research which indicates that racism engenders mental illness; that consequently black people are several times more likely to suffer mental illness; that the very experience of living in the United Kingdom may almost drive black people mad.
The artist Ajaykumar was part of Testimony's series of exhibitions.

Joanne Ball directed the Testimony documentary film 'True Sanctuaries'.

London's Screen Archives is a new regional network supporting organisations in London that hold collections of moving image material. It helps researchers and the public find these collections and tries to ensure the preservation of important material made in or about our city.

Oral history project by the Museum of London. Mainly text based, London’s Voices explores, reflects and celebrates London’s great diversity through the voices, memories and opinions of Londoners. It opens up the Museum of London’s rich oral history collection.

Fiction by Maggie O'Farrell on three women's life stories around the closure of the psychiatric asylums.
Esme is sent to a mental asylum at age 16, not uncommon for wayward women in the 1930s. 61 year later, the asylum is being closed and her niece, Iris, is told she must come get her. Iris didn't even know Esme existed and takes her back to what had been the family home. She finds her aunt sane and articulate. When Esme finds that Kitty is alive in a nursing home, albeit suffering from Alzheimer's, she wants to visit her. The family secrets that led to Esme's incarceration might finally be exposed. Maggie O'Farrell's novel has received positive reviews with the New Statesman saying, "The haunting final pages are among the finest O'Farrell has ever written.

A local mental health charity in Leatherhead, Surrey. It was set-up after the local asylums of the Epsom Cluster closed and was inspired by the so-called clubhouse movement.

An interesting article by the BBC with web links to other sites. Mentions the Mental Health Bill. Written in Sept 2004, updated in April 2007

National Life Stories (formerly National Life Story Collection (NLSC)) was established in 1987 to 'record first-hand experiences of as wide a cross-section of present-day society as possible'. As an independent charitable trust within the Oral History Section of the British Library Sound Archive, NLS's key focus and expertise has been oral history fieldwork.

The National Survivor User Network (NSUN) brings together groups and organisations in England that are run by users and survivors of mental health services in one national network.

NSUN is itself a user-led initiative and aims to provide support to existing user-led groups and helps build capacity within the service user movement but does not represent the user movement and is not the voice of this movement.

The media has a key role in influencing public attitudes towards mental health and wellbeing. The media also has a responsibility to ensure that the reporting of mental health issues does not cause harm. This particularly the case when it comes to attempted or completed suicides.

The National Programme has supported the development and production of a guidebook to help journalists report accurately on these matters, using appropriate language to do so

An archive of World War Two memories - written by the public, gathered by the BBC

Opacity is US American website , where urban explorer post photos, including many of former asylum photos

Howard Mitchell analyses Lennox Castle Hospital, about ten miles from Glasgow at Lennoxtown. His study is the subject of the video clips that accompany this block. Lennox Castle Hospital belongs to the period of the 1920s and 1930s when separate provision for people with learning difficulties was being developed following the 1913 Mental Deficiency

The Refugee Community History Project has collected the previously untold stories of refugees who have settled in London since 1951 in order to highlight the enormous contributions they make to the city.

This major initiative to record refugees' first hand experiences for current and future generations to explore ran from June 2004 to April 2007. Over 150 refugees from 15 different groups have taken part. This web site contains sections -- both audio and text -- of those refugees' stories.

Refugees flee to foreign countries, like the UK, because of persecution in their home country, or because of a well-founded fear of persecution. This may be because of a refugee's race, religion, nationality, social group, political opinion, or as a result of war.

The project won the 2006 Charity Award for arts, culture and heritage.

The interviews collected by the project are archived at the Museum of London and constitute an extraordinary and unrivalled collection of testimony based material on the subject of refugees in the UK, they also formed the basis of the major exhibition Belonging which ran from November 2006 to February 2007. In addition the project has produced a variety of educational resources based upon the material collected including CD ROMs, a short film collection and a mobile exhibition. These are available free of charge.