Live Well Innovation Funding

In collaboration with Occupational Therapist (OT) Jemma Morgan, we're delighted to have been awarded funding for He do the Police in Different Voices, a project engaging mental health service users in an artist led programme to develop skills, confidence and resilience over a nine month period in 2017, which will result in the production or co-production of an artwork or resource for A Journey with The Waste Land.

T.S Eliot wrote part of this poem whilst recovering from his own mental illness in Margate in 1921, and the Research Forum have identified the need for further input into the exhibition by those with personal experience of mental health issues. Margate has a higher than average rate of mental illness and has traditionally been a place of convalescence for those affected. In celebrating the seminal poem Eliot wrote here during his ‘nervous breakdown’ and including new contemporary content informed/directed by those currently in a similar mental state to Eliot, the Research Group want to reverse the stigma often attached to mental health. They are keen to make this aspect of the poem’s genesis, and current experiences of mental health problems in Margate, accessible and intelligible to audiences visiting the exhibition.

As an OT, Jemma Morgan works with patients with acute mental health problems. As a member of the Waste Land Research Group she's been really keen to develop this aspect of the exhibition, so we're delighted we now have funding to bring an artist in to work with some of her inpatients and other service users to think about Eliot's time here, and the broader idea of Margate as an asylum.