Psychology Fringe Festival
“The more we can talk about mental health – and the more ways we find to talk about it, sing about it, rap, act, paint, photograph and so much else then the more chance we have of improving wellbeing more generally. Mental health isn’t something that belongs behind the clinic-room door or in the professor’s office. It belongs to all of us. ”
A small team of clinical psychologists established the Psychology Fringe Festival and the accompanying Beyond the Therapy Room Conference to present ‘different voices, opinions and perspectives on mental health’ and to ask how we can create a more psychologically caring society. That’s a perspective that we badly need.
Though it operates alongside the Division of Clinical Psychology’s annual conference, The Psychology Fringe Festival is very much publicly orientated. Its aim is to explore clinical psychology and mental health in a broader way, to think about how we relate to one another as human beings rather than focusing on a purely medicalized approach to difficulty and distress which we’re maybe more familiar with.
In that spirit, the festival uses art-based formats, such as dance, theatre, poetry, comedy, philosophy, art and workshops, and has touched on poverty, LGBT issues and the media as well as mental health. Programs and performances are often delivered by people with lived experience of mental health services, such as DanceSyndrome, Heart to Heart Theatre, and Neural Knitworks.
Its sister program, The Beyond the Therapy Room conference similarly focuses on celebrating innovative ways of working, highlighting what we can do beyond one-to-one therapy to engage with wider issues affecting people’s mental health, including the social and political climate.
Following successful events in London, Liverpool, Cardiff, and Manchester, the Psychology Fringe Festival is giving us some much needed alternatives for ways forward and ways of being. They are bringing to the fore increasingly urgent conversations created by the circumstances of our rapidly evolving world by the people who understand them most. That’s a new kind of festival that we all need to exist.
Alternatives for supporting us through our everyday lives are popping up, but as clinical psychologist and one of the festival’s cofounders Will Curvis advises, we need to engage: “Show up at the conference and festival. Coming to events, meeting like-minded people, getting involved in these services - there’s a lot of opportunity to be active.” See you there next year?
To find out more: www.psychologyfringe.com / Twitter @ClinPsychFringe / Facebook @psychologyfringe
