Policy and Popular Culture Programme

Interaction announces the launch of our new programme, Policy and Popular Culture in Mental Health (PaPC).

The programme brings together various strands of popular culture including:

• Painting
• Poetry
• Comedy and satire
• Photography
• Cartoons
• Puppetry
• Theatre and mime.

The purpose is to enable grassroots organisations and local stakeholders (with an emphasis on people who have used services) to engage in policy in new and creative ways using their strengths, talents and abilities.

Using art forms and popular culture, the programme will create and critique ideas and thinking. It will create an international network of policy activists who use the arts to create public action for change.

The PaPC programme is not a finished concept. Rather it is a constantly evolving programme that involves grassroots activists from the very beginnings. Our online forum is already calling for ideas and input in to the development of programmatic activities.

Trying to develop a programme in a new way

Most international mental health programmes develop in the minds of one organisation and then partners are sought from other countries. This is often very efficient as one organisation can take a lead on planning and situational analysis and produce the project proposal and business plan. Also, on a more pragmatic level, this ensures that the organisation that invests the most time and resources to develop the project (and this could be considerable) they retain intellectual copyright of the work and maintain leadership. In the real world the types of organisation that usually fulfil this role are western organisations with their advantages of power and resource. The organisations that are invited to be partners are inevitably the local organisations in middle and low-income countries. Much of the time this works reasonably well but research by the Centre for Reflection on Mental Health Policy also identifies that there are some problems with this form of project development. Not least this approach risks excluding local beneficiaries and activists. It also retains power and control in western organisations rather than working in open, shared ways with equal partners.

Over the coming months we will be developing PaPC in a different and more open way. This page of the website will document this development.

The principles of PaPC development include:

• Open debate and discussion about the development of the programme
• An open invitation to partners in all parts of the world
• The development of a programme network to develop the business plan and market the activities
• A diversity of art forms and popular cultural activities included
• Peer-to-peer evaluation and monitoring of progress
• A learning approach to programme development
• A de-centralised programme management approach
• An open source ideology to PaPC activities, tools, models and approaches.

Will it work? Will it fail? Well, it is too early to answer these questions yet. But we can be sure we will learn valuable lessons for the future.

We will soon post an initial business plan as a consultation document on this page and invite discussion.

Interaction Inspirations...

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