Mental health and the arts
A visual record of programmes, research, gatherings, commissions and ideas connecting arts, displacement and mental health, centred on the activity and momentum of 2025 and 2026.
Explore the full story by date, category or part. Every description is shown in full, with source links collected at the end. Now also holding the research study, the Holding Space evaluation and the Protocol of Care.
Every documented event, publication, commission and gathering in the strand, with sources where they exist. Search by name, or filter by kind of work and by period.
Nothing matches that. Try a shorter search, or clear the filters.
The research study
Creative arts facilitators and the making of refugee narratives in the UK. Research by Zeina Ahmed Ismail, MASc Creative Health, University College London, in partnership with Counterpoints Arts.
There is now real evidence that creative practice supports wellbeing for people seeking sanctuary. There is almost none on the people who make that practice happen. This study asked eighteen of them.
The findings were presented at Our Work in Mental Health on 23 September 2026. An outline of the talk and the full slides are available, as are the search strings, the topic guides and the poll outputs.
Four themes. Each is a tension: something facilitation makes possible, and something current structures take away.
What it enables. Creative expression enables non-verbal agency and a reclaiming of voice, body and time. Art lets people take part without having to speak, and lets someone rebuild a self that bureaucracy interrupted.
What interrupts it. Short-term funding, unrecognised emotional labour, and evaluation metrics that decide in advance what is allowed to count as impact.
"Non-verbal communication, image making, art making. It's an instant tap into the psyche and an instant tap into how that person is feeling."
What it enables. Creative spaces build connection and safety through optionality, with no compulsory disclosure. You do not have to perform your worst experience to earn your place in the room.
What limits it. Access stays shaped by networks, resources, institutional recognition, translation, and a mismatch between what institutions recognise and how communities already make things.
"You don't have to talk about your pain to belong."
What it enables. Facilitators help people author and complicate their own stories, and push back against hostile media framings.
What constrains it. Funders and media reward simple before-and-after stories. Complex lives get compressed into a success narrative, and the account centres the helper rather than the community.
"The white saviour complex. This kind of hero narrative. I provide a service, and I completely burn myself out."
What it enables. Co-design, shared authorship and vulnerable leadership. Authority spread across a room rather than held at the front of it.
What threatens it. This model needs continuity, and short project cycles are what the sector reliably supplies. Practitioners hold other people's distress with none of the supervision a comparable caring role would carry.
"The facilitator. Someone like me who makes the extra things happen. We're the most vulnerable because we're not protected."
| Method | n | Duration | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| Individual interviews | 8 | 45 to 75 min | Semi-structured, trauma-informed, audio-recorded |
| Focus Group 1 | 6 | 180 min | 25 July 2025. Co-facilitated, Mentimeter polling |
| Focus Group 2 | 4 | 120 min | 29 September 2025. Co-facilitated, Mentimeter polling |
Design. Interpretivist and qualitative, drawing on the phenomenological sensibility of interpretative phenomenological analysis and applying reflexive thematic analysis after Braun and Clarke. Over 100 initial codes were constructed in NVivo, then clustered, reviewed against the full dataset and refined into four themes.
Sample. 18 practitioners. 6 with lived experience of forced migration, 12 allied professionals. Experience from 2 years to over 10. 15 based in London or the South of England, 3 elsewhere in the UK.
Ethics. UCL approval, formally amended mid-study as terminology developed. All 18 participants gave written informed consent. Everyone is pseudonymised.
What the study cannot claim. Eighteen participants is qualitative depth, not statistical representativeness, and no figure here generalises to the sector. The sample skews heavily to London and the South East. The researcher was embedded with the partner organisation for two years, which gave access and trust and also shaped interpretation. A reflexive diary documents that; it does not remove it.
A systematic search across eleven databases. This is the Web of Science funnel, representative of all of them.
| Stage | Filter applied | Records |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | All concept blocks combined | 625,094 |
| 2 | Practitioner and arts-activity terms | 22,244 |
| 3 | Child and youth-only studies removed | 21,197 |
| 4 | Restricted to the UK | 91 |
| 5 | Refugee or sanctuary AND arts required | 65 |
| 6 | Current year only | 37 |
| 7 | Usable after screening | 34 |
| 8 | Arts-facilitator × refugee intersection | 0 to 3 |
The field itself is growing fast: 417 PubMed records and 4,537 ScienceDirect records across 2015 to 2025, rising nearly every year. It is simply not looking at the practitioner.
In their own words
Published in full rather than in selection, so you can read past the lines quoted on a slide and see what else was said. Every name is a pseudonym. Every quote appears here because the person who said it agreed it could be used in outputs arising from the research, including events like ours.
Nothing matches that.
This set is still growing. If you are looking for a quote you heard at the event and cannot find it here, please ask us.
The gatherings
A series of gatherings, conferences, workshops and webinars, bringing together artists, activists, mental health practitioners, refugees and sanctuary seekers, and community organisers, to explore how arts and creativity can support the wellbeing of displaced people.
The survey responses behind everything on this page are published in full, event by event and question by question, along with the transcribed workshop notes and the care exercise: read the survey data and the workshop notes.
| Event | When | Who was there |
|---|---|---|
| Belfast | May 2025 | Festival organisers, community volunteers, local government and youth workers |
| Creativity, Displacement and Mental Health webinar | April 2025 | 34 attendees from NHS trusts, arts organisations, universities and grassroots refugee groups |
| Bradford | November 2025 | The national gathering. Live captioning and British Sign Language interpretation provided |
| London | January 2026 | 61 registered, including museum professionals, artists, mental health clinicians, academics and sanctuary seekers |
Community impact cannot always be captured through traditional metrics. Attendees emphasised lived experience, storytelling, emotional and social wellbeing, and relational learning as meaningful ways to understand impact.
"Not everything that counts can be counted."
Grassroots organisations face significant pressure to evidence impact while working with limited resources. Attendees highlighted long-term funding, facilitator support and sustained relationships, rather than short-term outcome-driven projects.
Attendees emphasised participant-led, co-produced work rooted in listening, collaboration and lived experience, where communities shape the work that affects them.
The most common request was for the events themselves to make art rather than only discuss it.
"Didn't learn as much as I had hoped. Too much talking and intellectualising, why wasn't art or music used to explore the themes?"
We publish the criticism alongside the praise. It was the most useful feedback we received.
Belonging and inclusion. Environments where everyone feels accepted and valued, and where refugees and sanctuary seekers belong in the circle rather than at its margins.
Care and compassion. A trauma-informed approach in every interaction, extending to self-care and community care among practitioners.
Justice and equity. Understanding power imbalances and countering them, giving lived experience equal respect to professional expertise.
Collaboration and being alongside. Working with, not for. A rejection of saviour narratives.
Listening and co-learning. Truly hearing people without rushing to fix.
Play and creativity. Joy and playfulness as liberating, even when the subject is trauma.
Patience, keeping it simple and slow. Letting relationships develop at a natural pace.
Courage and innovation. The bravery to challenge hierarchy and conventional evaluation.
Solidarity and exchange. Standing with each other, and a two-way giving and receiving.
Published outputs
The two published outputs the mental health strand was building towards.
Published July 2026.
It sets out how to hold creative spaces with people seeking sanctuary in a way that protects everyone in the room, including the person facilitating it.
Three of its instructions show what that means in practice. Offer consent that can be changed later, rather than treating a signature at the start as permanent. Protect people from becoming content. Name the quiet space explicitly, so that stepping out of a discussion is a normal option rather than a failure.
Launched 23 September 2026, Yorkton Workshops.
The Framework brings the strand together: the five pillars, the Protocol of Care, the research across seven organisations, the 164-page report, Stories of Change, and everything documented in the impact timeline.
It arrives sixteen years after Counterpoints Arts first launched The Arts, Refugees and Mental Health in December 2010.
The Mental Health Framework itself is still to be published here. If you would like it sooner, please get in touch and we will send it to you directly.
Read and download
Everything published so far, in full and unedited. The appendices are the raw material behind the two pieces of research: the searches that were run, the questions that were asked, and what people actually wrote down. They are published so that the findings can be checked rather than taken on trust.
The complete guide as Counterpoints Arts published it on 20 July 2026, developed by Maren Ellermann. Aims and core principles, safeguarding before during and after, support for artists and for audiences, how to write and place a trigger warning, what to do when someone is triggered, signposting, reflection and facilitator wellbeing. Also available as a PDF. It is published to be shared, adapted and made your own.
The complete literature search, thirty Boolean strings across six indexes with live result counts. All three topic guides, for the interviews and both focus groups. Every Mentimeter question and its results. Published so the study can be checked, repeated and built on.
Survey responses from five gatherings, organised by event and by question. The Belfast pre-conference survey in full, where every one of seven practitioners independently named funding. The transcribed workshop notes. The care exercise, both flip-chart questions and every answer given.
An outline of the ten-minute presentation given at Our Work in Mental Health on 23 September 2026, for anyone who was in the room and wants to revisit it, or who was not and wants to know what was said. It carries the findings, the polling and the recommendations in the order they were given.
Forty-nine slides. The policy context, the search funnel, the methodology and ethics in detail, the thematic map for each of the four findings, the polling results, the barrier-to-action tables, and an appendix carrying all seventy-one participant quotes.
Thirty-seven sheets at 420 by 297 millimetres, two entries to a sheet with a colour key, made for printing and reading on a table rather than on a screen. There is also a widescreen version for presenting from.
Every participant quote from the study, grouped by speaker and theme, in an editable document for quoting in reports, funding bids and evaluations. The timeline itself is also available as a Word file if you need to work from the text.
Support and signposting
Refugee Council · British Red Cross · City of Sanctuary UK · Migrant Help · Right to Remain · Rethink Mental Illness
National Centre for Creative Health · The Baring Foundation · Centre for Cultural Value · Culture Health and Wellbeing Alliance · Counterpoints Arts
If there is a resource you think belongs here, please tell us and we will add it.
Work in progress
This is a working resource and it is still being built. Here is what is being added, so you know what to expect and what to ask for.
Nine items came off this list on 25 September 2026: the full literature search, the three topic guides, the poll results, the Holding Space survey data, the Belfast pre-conference survey, the workshop notes, the care exercise, an outline of the talk given on the day, and the full presentation slides. They are all under documents and downloads. The Protocol of Care has since been published in full as well, which leaves five.
Both UCL ethics approvals and the amendment documentation · the Mentimeter poll screens as images, alongside the results already published
Event agendas and speaker lists for Belfast, Bradford and London · photographs of the flip-charts and the live illustration in high resolution, the transcriptions are already published · the Mental Health Framework in full
Reference
Every source link cited across the timeline, 59 in total.