The Arts and Mental Health Association

Art can activate mind, body and commitment, which is why the Arts and Mental Health Association established the Centre for Arts and Mental Health. In a collaboration between health professionals, professional artists and psychiatric users, storytelling workshops are developed and run with a focus on storytelling as a free space on the road to recovery.
The art-based platform Our Storytelling Centre, to be established under the auspices of the Centre for Arts and Mental Health, is aimed at adults with mental illness who participate in storytelling workshop groups during or after their treatment services in psychiatry and is thus a bridging effort in the transition between treatment and civilian life. In the workshops, the participants can experience a free space and that the group format allows for a social reorganization around the common artistic work.
The project should be seen as a post-hospital effort that bridges the gap between hospital and civil society and at the same time by qualifying psychiatric users as workshop leaders can also become a peer effort. In addition, with the involvement of volunteers and open events, the project build bridges to the surrounding community, just as radio podcasts and videos are becoming available online to a national audience.

Rewritalize is a research programme structured as a participatory writing project and a creative intervention in mental health care initiated with the introduction of the Center for Arts and Mental health, a multi-arts center at Amager Psychiatric Hospital in Copenhagen in 2017. The project had two main objectives: firstly, to develop guidelines to ensure identical methods for further practice and research; secondly, to identify the mechanisms of the creative group intervention. Rewritalize was led by six professional Danish authors in collaboration with mental health care professionals, and it was structured in a series of creative writing courses and shared reading sessions, using these individual and group activities as therapeutic approaches in both physical and mental health care. The writing groups commenced in 2017, in several culture and medical care venues in Copenhagen, and were conducted by a professional author-facilitator in collaboration with a mental health care professional.