Talk, talk, talk...

Sorry for not posting yesterday but we are quite busy right now. Kirsten and volunteers are beavering away at the archive. And we are preparing two talks about Oor Mad History.

The first one is at 'Doing the 'right thing': Tension between the popular, political and scientific', the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Scottish Mental Health Research Network. It's on Tuesday in Glasgow, and I am speaking in the 3.15 pm slot. The other speaker is Neil Quinn who is involved in the development of the Scottish Service User Research Network.

I am going to talk about about the service users doing research. Oor Mad History is primarily an oral history and archiving project, so I will focus on oral history. 

I will also talk about some of the other research that service users supported by CAPS have done. One is about people's experiences of detention [PDF] under the Mental Health Act. Another is about the work done by people with a diagnosis of personality disorder.

The research we do can be considered as Action Research - that is, doing the research is part of changing things. Simply put, people talk about their experiences and say what needs to be done differently. Of course, doing this is a bit more complicated!

The second talk is at the University of Edinburgh on Monday 29th November at 5pm. The Public Policy Network is holding an event called The different experiences of mental health and illness. We are still talking through the ideas for this talk so I won't tell you anymore for now. Other speakers come from backgrounds in therapy and theology, social anthropology and psychiatry. We'll all be talking about about how perceptions of mental illness has changed over time.

Both events are open to the public but you need to book - see the links for each talk for the details.

I'll be doing both talks and I tend to talk from notes as opposed to reading a prepared talk, so I won't have the full text to put up here. But I will put those notes and any slides.