#26: Men’s Mental Wellbeing Festival – Hastings

It has been an intense couple of weeks but I managed to get everything together in time to attend the Men’s Mental Wellbeing Festival in Hastings. It was great to be invited back and have another chance to strengthen my relationship with the Mind Charity who organised the event.

It was a challenge to get everything ready in time, I’ve been working in Norwich for the past two weeks so I took all my materials to my accommodation and worked on the project in the evenings at the Air B&B. But it was a really useful excuse to get me to focus my efforts after a couple of months of free exploration, suddenly I needed to be decisive.

To that end I focussed a good amount of time in creating a What How Why? document for the intervention, but I found it really useful so I ended up describing more about the project in general. I’ve attached the document here:

I decided to install two stained glass windows in the unit I had built, with a section in the middle for the participants to place three archetype cards, one to represent the past, one for the present and one for the future.

The idea was that it would be a place for the participants to sit and consider their archetypes and to record their thoughts and feelings in the hope of providing deeper clarity about the symbols they have chosen to explore. There are two questions posed on the two windows, ‘What does it mean?’ and ‘How does it feel?’. Participants would write down their responses to these on small index cards I had made.

I built a very simple structure around it using hazel poles and hessian and set it up in the garden of the Air B&B one evening. It felt quite magical and I was excited about it. I got everything ready and made sure to print some feedback forms as I was hoping to be able to record more useful data from the intervention and gain more insight on my practise.

I arrived on Hastings seafront and was given the option to be inside or outside, I decided that there was more space to display everything outside. There were several other stalls set up outside along with a fire pit and a drum circle, the atmosphere was quite festive and I was curious how the general public would react to the project in that environment.

However the setup was complicated by the wind, it meant that I wasn’t able to erect the booth I had made as there was a risk it would get blown over. This would impact the process that people would be undertaking, it meant that the participants wouldn’t have the privacy offered by the booth, which might mean they felt less able to share their deeper reflections.

I quickly realised that this wouldn’t be the controlled intervention that I had imagined. The festive environment was not conducive to connecting to deep or uncomfortable feelings, and as the process had to be altered it would be less in-depth and also less measured than I would have liked. I resolved that this would be less about gathering useable data, and more of a ‘shop window’ type of event where I would be able to gauge the general responses of the public and perhaps make some light and tentative steps towards encouraging people to take part in the process.

It was really interesting to see how people reacted to the project, and I managed to get 4 people to take part in the process, they just didn’t sit at the unit and write down the meaning of their chosen archetypes. Instead they just filled out the story books with an archetype from the past, present and future.

In order to reflect more deeply on the event I have completed a document that uses these guiding questions: What was interesting? What was insightful? What was intriguing? And what was inspiring?

Among the most significant reflections I came away with included a conversation I had with a gentleman who mentioned “I’m a bit worried that I might get sad.” when he started the activity. I realised straight away that this was a comment that went right to the heart of my current research question. After he completed the activity he started to allude to some physical abuse that he had suffered as a child and hasn’t told anyone about. He was speaking about it calmly and didn’t seem to be in any distress, but I realised in the moment that this was actually quite a serious position I had found myself in. I had encouraged this gentleman to make contact with these experiences and I had a responsibility to care for what came up. 

I suggested therapy and mentioned an organisation that I had found helpful who ran sessions over zoom. He expressed that he found zoom sessions too difficult and said that he would probably organise some therapy for himself eventually. He left the experienced seeming generally quite positive and thankful for the opportunity, even though I felt that I wasn’t really able to offer him any help to move forward with. But upon further reflection I felt that I can’t hope to offer any meaningful help to process his trauma, at the end of the day this needs to be handled by mental health professionals.

Overall I was really encouraged by this interaction, I had hoped The Library would help people to make connection with these kind of uncomfortable feelings and I was surprised that it had been achieved despite the less than ideal conditions for meaningful introspection. But I realised that I should be careful what I wish for, I’m actually not equipped to deal with this sort of trauma if it comes up.

I think that I don’t actually need to go to extreme lengths to get people to reflect on themselves, it seems to me that generally speaking people are carrying their experiences around with them wherever they go. What is more important, and perhaps more useful, is the space that I create to hold these people and their experiences.

Another important result from the day is the connection that was strengthened with a key stakeholder; Tara Reddy. She runs Arts On Prescription which its an organisation based in Hastings that implements arts based therapies into GP referral pathways. This is exactly the sort of area that I am interested in exploring with The Library. She came and said hello and reiterated how much she loves the project and how inspired she was by it last time she saw it. She went as far as gathering people she knew at the event and shepherding them over to meet me and see the project. She can be heard in the video below remarking “I just think it’s so magical!”. I promise this moment was coincidental and not staged by me!

I found her enthusiasm to be very inspiring, especially the use of the word “magical”. It was just the sort of reaction I was hoping to elicit and I am bolstered by the encouragement. She invited me to attend a community day that they are holding in Hastings in April with a mind to getting me involved win running some workshops in the future.

Overall the day provided some useful insight, even though I didn’t manage to use the full process I had planned or gather the data that I need. It was still illuminating to have those conversations and see how people responded to it, I’m sure these insights will continue to percolate and provide useful guidance for the next iteration. Plus now everything is set up and ready to go, so I am planning on holding a more controlled intervention in a couple of weeks where I will be able to record some more useful data and get people to undertake the full process.