Applied Theatre Praxis and the Transition between Child & Adolescent and Adult Mental Health Services: care, narrative and the embodied encounter

Abstract

This thesis explores the potential for applied theatre praxis to support young people in the transition between Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and Adult Mental Health Services (AMHS), a key priority in contemporary health care. Literature on applied theatre in mental health contexts and the transition between CAMHS and AMHS have not previously been brought together; this thesis thus seeks to provide a unique contribution to the literature on arts and health, attending to the lack of research on theatre in this field. Overall, it questions how the textural qualities of creative encounters might provide an avenue to explore relational dynamics in mental health care, and argues that a developed aesthetics of care must give attention to both service users’ narrative identity and their embodied presence in the space. The research takes a mixed method approach and sits within an autoethnographic framework, examining the author’s own lived experiences and professional practice. In doing so it recognises not only the lack of neutrality in any research enquiry, but also the insights into this research territory that this subjective positioning provides. It uses applied thematic analysis to consider the primary data gathered: the experiences of service users, those who have cared for them, and professionals who have worked with them. In articulating the complex histories of these services and the interface between them, it commits to keeping the lived experience of those affected at the heart of the analysis, leading the research design. This analysis directed the research to its focus on stigma and the significance of narrative understandings of identity in the CAMHS-AMHS transition. In presenting an investigation of how service transition is phenomenologically experienced by service users (as bodies situated in their social and material contexts) together with analysis of the modes and methods of interaction sought by practitioners facilitating socially engaged arts practices, it does not offer a fixed taxonomy of practices or approaches that can be instrumentalised or neatly package up to be applied across a spectrum of contexts. Instead, it offers tentative connections, suggestions and possibilities, interrogating the potential for socially engaged theatre praxis to support mental health service transition.