“The reason I wanted to participate...is because I want to effect change for women, particularly women who have experienced trauma and have intersected with the mental health system…That makes me feel angry, that I’ve gone somewhere to get help and I continue to be oppressed and not heard.”
Preliminary findings indicate the need for significant changes in mental health practices and the need to:
Understand the detrimental impacts of medicalising women’s emotional suffering
Address the social drivers of distress (such as gendered violence and poverty)
Recognise the role that involuntary mental health treatment often plays in heightening rather than alleviating distress
Develop alternatives to coercive and restrictive practices
“I was experiencing massive overwhelming grief. And that’s what I needed support with. But it was very much pathologised…I got labelled with borderline personality disorder, and it was pretty much all downhill from there.”
— Research participant
“Hospital makes you sometimes more unwell…there’s very little I feel that they do to help you recover, apart from just giving you medication.”
— Research participant
“There’s so many mums out there…struggling deep – like they don’t need you to tell them what to do… Let her go have a shower…Go wash some bottles. Do something.”
— Research participant
“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
Arts-based research approaches are enabling women’s stories, strengths, and wisdom to be heard from the margins.
The project team includes researchers who have valuable ‘insider knowledges’ as a result of their personal experiences of involuntary mental health treatment.
The research methods include in-depth interviews, action research groups, arts-based research, and co-analysis workshops.
People who are involved in the study include:
Women with lived experiences of involuntary mental health treatment.
Family and friends who hold deep hopes about mental health system reform.
Mental health workers who are passionate about the need to develop alternative responses to distress and suffering.
