When we think about what safety and care might mean in the context of health services and in relation to mental health, we might think about compassion, attentiveness, dignity and respect. Or, the concept of safety, for example, might bring to mind ideas of restriction, control, and risk aversion – perhaps the safety of staff is prioritised over the safety of patients or people using services. Safety and care can mean very different things to different people, at different times, and in different places.
We’re interested in publishing several blogs by people with lived experience considering what care and safety means and looks like (or doesn’t look like) for people experiencing mental ill health, distress, and trauma in various health and wellbeing settings, including:
- Mental health services (including community, inpatient, therapy settings…)
- General Practice
- Social care
- Physical healthcare
- Gender healthcare
- Dental healthcare
- Sexual healthcare
- Pregnancy and abortion healthcare
- Older age healthcare
- Pharmacy/prescribing contexts
You might want to consider issues such as the rise in “trauma-informed care”, issues around being believed and respected by healthcare staff, and the tensions and complexity of (sometimes repeated) disclosure of mental ill-health, distress and trauma in healthcare settings. You might want to consider just care, just safety, or both, depending on what they mean to you.
You are welcome to pitch pieces that consider how things currently are, or how you would like them to be, or both.
We welcome pitches that consider non-mental health settings – but ask that if your piece is about a setting outside of mental health, your piece is focused on making the link between what care and safety looks like in this setting for people with experience of mental ill-health, distress and trauma.
Guidelines
Payment to the writers of commissioned pieces will be £100. Please note that we are expecting to receive more submissions than we are able to commission.
The commissioned blogs will be published on the NSUN website in our Member’s Blogs section. We ask that you join as an NSUN member for free if you have not already: sign up here.
We are looking for commissioned blogs to be between 500-1000 words in length. We will only be commissioning U.K. based writers with lived experience of mental ill-health, trauma, and/or distress. We are not looking for academic pieces of writing but welcome referenced work. We are not currently looking to commission fiction or poetry. There is the option to publish the piece anonymously.
We are asking for pitches of around 200-300 words to tell us what you want to write about, which ideally will be in the format of an initial outline of your proposed piece. Please feel free to include links to your writing if you have any, though this is not essential.
Timeframes
We are asking for pitches by Monday 12th June 2023 at 5pm, and we are looking to publish pieces from the end of June and throughout July. Please email us at info@nsun.org.uk if you have any questions, or pitch using the google form below or by clicking here.