Creative Positions in Adult Mental Health

Sue McNab worked as a Systemic Psychotherapist in CAMHS in London before moving to Adult Mental Health services in Oxford Health NHS Trust ten years ago. She has also been attached to the Tavistock Centre and the Institute of Family Therapy as a trainer and supervisor on the Masters courses and currently works on the Advanced Diploma in the Supervision of Family and Systemic Psychotherapy at IFT. During a period of working on adolescent inpatient units, she became interested in mother blaming and shaming discourses and has written on this topic with her colleague and friend Ellie Kavner. Karen Partridge is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Systemic Psychotherapist currently working at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust and in private practice. Her clinical work has taken place primarily in adult mental health but she has worked across the age range and across services. Her PhD research was an enquiry into organisational change in hospitals, and she completed her systemic training at the KCC Foundation where she worked as a tutor and Co-Director. She teaches and supervises professionals in a wide range of settings and is interested in consultation and training in staff groups and organisations, and in the interface between therapy, community and organisational interventions, action research and social justice.

'Sue McNab and Karen Partridge are to be congratulated for assembling this book about creative positions in adult mental health. Each contribution uniquely brings alive in vivid and moving ways the importance of this book, demonstrating how making and taking creative positions can open up multiple opportunities to make a difference that is practically relevant for all those involved in adult mental health. This is one of those books that may well transcend professional and service boundaries and be on the reading lists of all disciplines and be a source of encouragement to people using professional services.'- John B. Burnham, systemic family psychotherapist, and author of Family Therapy: First Steps Towards a Systemic Approach'This collection is from a wonderful array of multi-cultural contributors who shape and form the many systemic therapeutic possibilities and innovations in the context of international mental health services. Such diversity is to be celebrated, as the main focus of the work is in the public services. The hope, coupled with the artistic and ethical brushstrokes outlined throughout, is indeed heartening in a time of manufactured austerity with its designed cut-backs, contraction, and the predominance of diagnosis with "results driven" practices at the expense of creative and effective treatments. Thank goodness for the bravery of this book, its editors, and its writers in their creative yet critical positionings, and for those vibrant (and sometimes rightly angry) marginal voices.'- Imelda McCarthy, PhD, systemic therapist, supervisor, writer, and presenter

• Series Editors’ Foreword , Foreword , Preface , Preface , Introduction , Outside in: A Stance Towards Theory , Psychiatric diagnosis and its dilemmas , Missing the point: the shy story of disappointment , Dancing between discourses , Constructing Alternative Positions , Coming to reasonable terms with our histories: narrative ideas, memory, and mental health , “Where the hell is everybody?” Leanna’s resistance to armed robbery ?and negative social responses , Psychiatry, emotion, and the family: from expressed emotion to ?dialogical selves , Inside Out: An Appreciation of Practice , Space In Tight Corners: Practice-Based Examples , Open dialogues mobilise the resources of the family and the patient , Narrative psychiatry , Family needs, family solutions: developing family therapy in adult mental health services , The significance of dialogue to wellbeing: learning from social constructionist couple therapy , Privileging the Voice of the Client and Therapist , Narrative therapy with children of parents experiencing mental health difficulties , Hearing Voices: creating theatre from stories told by mental health service users , Beyond the spoken word , Voices from the frontline: “keeping on keeping on”—what matters to staff working in adult mental health services? , Afterword , Afterword