Creating a Healing Campus: A Partnership between a University and a Provider of Mental Health Services

Abstract

This chapter describes and analyzes a project offering university-based courses to local people with mental health problems. Converge is a partnership between York St John University and the National Health Service (NHS) that is built on a convergence of interests of the two organizations: real world experience for university students and good quality, non-stigmatizing courses for people with mental health problems. Three key principles of the project will be considered: to work with participants as students and to frame the provision as education, not therapy; to involve university students in the delivery of the courses and in the support of participants; and to work closely with the university and mental health providers in order to offer a resource that supports social integration and recovery.

It will be proposed that this partnership provides the conditions for the creation of a “healing campus”: an attempt to heal the “fracture” between people who experience mental health problems and their communities that began with their disappearance into large mental hospitals in the 18th and 19th centuries. The healing that this chapter examines is not merely of people who identify as having mental health problems but of a social and cultural fracture revealed in the stigma and shame that still surrounds mental ill health.

Citation

Rowe, N. (2015), "Creating a Healing Campus: A Partnership between a University and a Provider of Mental Health Services", University Partnerships for Community and School System Development (Innovations in Higher Education Teaching and Learning, Vol. 5), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 119-134. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2055-364120150000005007