Expanding Psychosis Care: Integrating Creativity and Community- 3-3:45pm Integrating Evidence and Meaning: Rethinking Psychosis Care through Clinical, Creative and Lived Experience Perspectives - Lorna Collins, PhD, FHEA, FRSPH, FRSA, Anthony David, PhD, Roxana Baiasu, PhD, SFHEA
- 3:45-4:15pm: Whatever Happened to Disalienation? From Theatre to Shared Stories: Collective Cultural Practices as a Response to Psychosis - Boglarka Hardy
Integrating Evidence and Meaning: Rethinking Psychosis Care through Clinical, Creative and Lived Experience Perspectives - Lorna Collins, PhD, FHEA, FRSPH, FRSA, Anthony David, PhD, Roxana Baiasu, PhD, SFHEA
This interdisciplinary panel brings together lived experience, clinical and academic expertise, creative and philosophical perspectives to explore how people living with psychosis can receive holistic, responsive care. It focuses on the integration and interactions of medication and standard evidence-based therapies with creative practices such as art and writing, exploring how these modalities can influence each other and shape recovery. Drawing on clinical expertise as well as lived experience, the panel explores the complex realities of pharmacological treatment (considering its challenges and benefits) and how creative art practices can complement and reframe clinical care. The panel will refer to lived experiences of engaging with psychopharmacology alongside arts on prescription and creative health practices, in the context of receiving treatment for acute psychosis. These inquiries are further pursued through ethical and phenomenological considerations of fundamental questions about meaning, values, and person-centred approaches in mental health.
Whatever Happened to Disalienation? From Theatre to Shared Stories: Collective Cultural Practices as a Response to Psychosis - Boglarka Hardy
Whatever Happened to Disalienation? From Theatre to Shared Stories: Collective Cultural Practices as a Response to Psychosis In 1953, Jean Oury and Félix Guattari initiated an annual theatrical performance at La Borde Clinic in France. Patients, psychiatrists, nurses, gardeners, and administrative staff rehearsed and performed together. This was not simply an artistic activity. It was the treatment.The underlying idea was disalienation: the belief that psychosis is not only an individual disorder but also a rupture of the social link, and that recovery requires collective practices capable of rebuilding relationships, shared meaning, and a sense of belonging.Today, such practices have almost disappeared from mainstream psychiatry and have become rare even within alternative mental health institutions. Yet comparable approaches may still be recognised in other settings, including psychodrama, bibliotherapy, music groups, film discussion groups, peer storytelling, and community arts initiatives.Drawing on the theoretical framework of French institutional psychotherapy, this presentation examines six currently operating alternative mental health institutions across five European countries: La Borde (France), Soteria Berlin (Germany), Klinik Arlesheim (Switzerland), DSM Trieste (Italy), and Stichting Weerklank and Centrum de Brouwerij (the Netherlands). Each has developed distinct collective practices aimed at counteracting isolation and rebuilding social connectedness.Building on this comparative analysis, the presentation asks three questions: Which collective cultural practices are capable of performing the disalienating function that theatre performed at La Borde? What distinguishes genuinely disalienating practices from activities that are merely recreational or occupational? And what would it take for such practices to regain a central place within contemporary psychiatry?
