Welcome to Oor Mad History Blog!

Hello and welcome to our blog!

My name is Kirsten Maclean, I am a Community History Worker with Oor Mad History.

OMH is based at a project called CAPS (Consultation and Advocacy Promotion Service) in Edinburgh. CAPS provide an independent advocacy service, working with people who experience mental health problems.

In September of last year an event was held to coincide with a visit from David Reville, a Canadian mental health 'consumer' and academic. User groups from all over Lothian came to meet with David, who teaches a univeristy course in Mad People's History at Ryerson University in Toronto.

Service Users were inspired by this visit and began to think about what work could be done here around Service User History. A Steering Group was formed to put together a funding proposal to NHS. Funding was secured and a worker, myself, was recruited.

In the first two years we are putting together a Lothian Wide archive, both paper based (posters, leaflets etc) and an Oral History Archive of people who have been active in the Movement.

What happens then? Well we want to create resources based on the work done in the first two years, which can be used to celebrate the movement, train professionals and challenge the stigma still associated with mental health problems.

This is a hugely exciting project. We hope that it will raise the profile of the Service User Movement and highlight what has been achieved in the last 30 years. We hope to learn from the past and from each other and to take this learning forward into future campaigns. OMH will highlight the involvement of Service Users in the development of key services.

Are you or have you been involved with a User Group in Edinburgh or Lothians? Please get in touch! We want to hear from you!

Do you have any old leaflets, posters, minutes of meetings? Get in touch!

Interested? Want to find out more? Please comment here or email me at

kirsten@capsadvocacy.org

Thanks for reading...