Reclaiming Our Heritage: What is Innovation in Mental Health Arts Projects

SMHAF Podcast

Content Warning: Features discussion of suicidal ideation This is Reclaiming Our Heritage, a Mental Health Foundation podcast inspired by its two-year oral history project supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The project’s aim is to record and preserve the spoken testimonies of the mental health community between the 1950s and early 2000s. The full interviews by these contributors and others are available in the Reclaiming Our Heritage archive on the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival website. Each episode will explore themes that have come out of these spoken testimonies, and these will be further discussed by a professional guest. In this episode, Halina Rifai speaks to guest Emma Jayne Park, dancer, theatre maker, collaborator and micro-activist, about the question of what is innovation in mental health arts projects with the help of testimonies from the Reclaiming Our Heritage archive. The Reclaiming our Heritage project is funded by a number of donors including an “Our Heritage” grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.