Centre for Mental Health

Group work has long been part of mental health research. Focus groups, workshops, and reflective sessions offer ways to gather insight, test ideas, and hear from those with lived experience. But too often, these formats are treated as neutral tools. A facilitator arrives, a discussion unfolds, transcripts are typed up, themes are extracted. The group becomes a vessel for data...

The Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence was introduced in England and Wales in 2005. It was intended for people considered dangerous, but whose offence did not merit a life sentence. Like a life sentence, it means a person can be in detention for a potentially unlimited period until they can prove that they are no longer a threat to the public. More than a decad...

The mental health strategy committed to by the Government is part way through its process, having concluded its call for evidence on 10 July. We, like many organisations, submitted our own response, which followed t...

When governments are making decisions about the policies they should make and where they should invest public money, savings in social security (so-called ‘welfare’) spending are often sought. “If you put money into x, you’ll spend less on benefits”, we’re often told by advocates of certain policies or interventions. This has become such ingrained behaviour, it’s almost alway...

A staple activity for us as researchers, before we start any kind of fieldwork, is a literature search. This is to give us a clear picture of what research has been done before, what questions have been answered, and what we might productively explore. For this we use specialist search engines. It’s all fairly routine.

A few months ago, I sat with a colleague and wa...