Spotlight Interview with theatre producer and mental health innovator Sandra Griffiths

Sandra Griffiths is a social entrepreneur, mental health innovator, systemic change specialist, and a theatre producer centring mental health lived experience narratives. Sandra is the founder of The Red Earth Collective which uses the arts to inspire stories, stimulate thinking and create conversations that support and improve the mental health and wellbeing of marginalised and racialised communities.

She is also the co-founder of the acclaimed Catalyst 4 Change – West Midlands African and Caribbean Mental Hub. For over 30 years this social entrepreneur has created innovative and sustainable programmes, campaigns and events centring the mental wellbeing of African and Caribbean communities. Sandra is also a Non-Executive Director at Maternity Engagement Action, a community- led organisation that provides safe spaces and peer support for Black Women alongside founder Amanda Smith and Lorna Armstead.

Sandra speaks to Joy Francis about the importance of co-production to tackle the enduring ethnic inequalities in mental health care, and the importance of disrupting the strong black woman trope that is “alive and kicking in the mental health space”.

What drew you to work in mental health, centring black men and black communities?

A past partner had mental health problems, and I didn’t deal with it very well. When that relationship ended, I reflected on my difficulty with dealing with his behaviour. That led me to look inward about what it was about this experience and his depression, that I found frightening and difficult to deal with.

The second thing is that my mum always talked about mental health in such a scary way, like it was something to be feared. She had lots of stories of people that she knew in Jamaica who had mental health problems and was so disparaging. I was outraged.

The third thing is that I’ve always been around people who have faced challenges with their mental health. I was drawn to it. Maybe it was a calling? I wanted to do something about it. I lived in East London for a long time, and I noticed seeing more black men on the streets with mental health problems and that bothered me. I saw a job in Brixton, at a black mental health organisation called Brixton Circles Project. I thought, this is it.

I supported the organisation in developing their services. I hadn’t worked in mental health before – I was from housing. That started my journey in the early 90s.  I wanted to be in this space, so it was a combination of the exploration of my own mental health but also what I thought about it.  I had a strong sense of social justice and could see many injustices in the experiences of people with mental health problems, and I wanted to do something about it.

As you were talking, I was struck by your candour about not managing your ex-partner’s mental health struggles very well. This may have been a significant factor in your ability to empathise and develop integrated approaches to support families and service users because a lot of people feel shame and guilt in this arena. We hear a lot of service users talking about how poorly their families have responded to their mental health challenges. The fact that you have your own lived experience and responded so constructively to it when a lot of people aren’t self-aware or are fearful, is important. How have you translated your firsthand experience into the work that you do and the choices that you now make?

I had quite a bit of shame, even embarrassment, about how I dealt with my situation because I’d always seen myself as a very supportive, empathetic and open person. So that was certainly part of my mission to recognise that there is a lot of unspoken fear and anxiety around mental health in all communities.

I know more about African and Caribbean communities. And I know there is a lot of shame and embarrassment that is hidden and is difficult to talk about. These things have been a driving force in the work that I have done to create space to allow people to speak freely about it without censorship. There are very few places where people can speak openly about how they feel about what’s going on in their lives. Everyday things from homelessness and relationship problems to having children or not being able to have children.

People talk in barber shops and hairdressers, for example. You sit in a hairdresser’s chair, and you talk. I’ve heard some amazing stories while at the hairdressers. The skills these hairdressers’ have to allow a person to talk, make them feel safe and craft their hair and make people feel good is so important.

Psychiatric units aren’t always those places. They are for some people. That plus medication works for some people. I am working in these spaces to make them more person centred and trauma informed.

Over the last 25 years things have changed significantly in a number of those services. There’s such a shift to looking at what the community does well. That’s the self-care and self-love piece within the mental health space that inspires me to do this work.

I want to talk about the award-winning Mellow, which you ran in Hackney, London for 12 years. Mellow allowed you to show the healing and strategic value of combining the arts and mental health for black men’s recovery and resilience at a time when this approach wasn’t widely pursued or invested in. What did it enable you to do for black communities in the face of the medical and institutionalised model, and where was the resistance to your vision as you were bringing black people out of the shadows of the statistics and humanising the whole process using creative tools?

Mellow was strategic from day one. Its starting point was the overrepresentation of African and Caribbean men in East London mental health services and trying to understand what were the factors that led to that and what we could do about it. It’s a strategic challenge. It’s a community challenge and it’s a systems challenge. What Mellow allowed us to do was to bring together some amazing people from the community and statutory services.

But there were separate conversations happening about the same issue within statutory and community services. The system thought it was a cultural (i.e. ganja psychosis), and the community blamed racism within society and in psychiatric services.  What we were trying to do through Mellow was to have a much more nuanced understanding of what the risk factors were in statutory services. We were hearing from black men with mental health problems, the community organisations that were supporting them and their carers. The arts were a way of enabling the system to listen in a way where they didn’t feel so bruised and triggered and blamed by what they were hearing.

When they were in that position it meant that they shut down the conversations with the community. That happened a couple of times. The system found it difficult to hear the experiences and just sit and listen rather than saying, no, that didn’t happen. Creating space to bring together everyone that had a role or responsibility or an experience relevant to this topic was important. I think we did that.

Sometimes we used an art form, such as a play. 4sight was one of the plays that we did when the Delivering Race Equality Framework was launched in 2005 following the death of David ‘Rocky’ Bennett. There was this massive review [by the Department of Health] on how he died in a psychiatric unit after being restrained. His sister Dr Joanna Bennett was instrumental in pushing the government to look at the restraint issue and how the mental health psychiatric system dealt with black men.

There was funding that enabled us to commission actors to firstly listen to around 32 black men in East London who used mental health services. They told us, warts and all, about what the problems were, what was not working within the system and what they wanted to see change.

From that we created four short playlets – collectively called 4sight – which were then performed to about 700 staff from across the East London NHS Foundation Trust. The plays were based on the lived experience of black men and immediately afterwards, in the same space, men with lived experience were trained to facilitate the conversations with the staff about what they saw, and to think collectively about how things can be improved.

Those are some of the things that Mellow developed and programmed to understand the risk factors. The problems weren’t just located within psychiatric services. We had to think about what was happening in the community generally: racism, homelessness, the social determinants that were shaping why black men were experiencing mental health problems. Also the stigma around telling someone that they’re having a problem which delayed them seeking help.

As for the resistance, most statutory services find it difficult to hear criticism from the community, are defensive about it and will say that the community doesn’t understand the complexity of the problems they’re dealing with, including a lack of resources.

You know as well as I do that there are people who live in the community and work in the system, so they do know. The problems are not new. The resistance to coming together and thinking together is shifting, certainly where I’m based now in Birmingham. There’s a real push to bring the community, the system and people with lived experience together to have a grown up, nuanced conversation about what the problem is and how collectively we can co-produce and co-design services.

So much has evolved from Mellow. You have the Stereo-Hype Festival that you chose to launch and develop in 2006 to reduce mental health stigma and support the wellbeing of African Caribbean communities. How would you describe it today now it’s 20 years old, and what impact do you believe it has had, and continues to have, on policy and enabling us to talk with less guilt and shame about black communities and mental health?

It started when I was in East London with a group of African and Caribbean service users, many of whom were creatives. The work we did with that group of service users, people with lived experience of mental health problems, involved them expressing themselves creatively. There was one person who inspired me and helped me to understand the power of creativity in discussions and in creating safe spaces where service users felt that they could just speak freely about what was going on for them. His name was Philip Morgan, who passed away.

Philip used to be a DJ back in the day. Things happened in his life, and he ended up in the mental health system. He was also a spoken word artist and had the ability to galvanise other people and was a great host. He found his community at the Tower Hamlets African and Caribbean mental health organisation, that supported his creativity and interest in heritage, then led by Harry Cumberbatch.

They were part of the development of Mellow and Stereo-Hype. That’s Stereo-Hype’s roots. It started as a small social event with money from Arts Council England which enabled us to employ an arts worker, Alison Evelyn. We started reaching out to established artists and created space to showcase the talent of people with lived experience. Suddenly it was no longer Philip, the mental health service user but Philip, the poet. And it was on our terms. We knew this was the way to engage our community, to challenge mental health stigma, to show that having lived experience was just one part of your identity.

Before I left London for Birmingham in 2013, I was working at Time to Change, the national anti-stigma campaign. I brought Stereo-Hype there with a full programme and a strong partnership approach showcasing the creative talent of African and Caribbean people with mental health problems.

It’s a space where we can talk and share the black mental health experience, and what’s working and not working. It’s also a space where alongside the Stereo-Hype marketplace, there is an evening event in a theatre setting for discussions like Black Men in the Couch. This features high profile black men from the world of sport and the arts openly talking about their lived experience with a black male therapist, [the founder Rotimi Akinsete] with questions from the audience.

This segment has been a real pull for black men. We’ve invited men like Stan Collymore, Herol Graham, Paul Canoville, Vanley Burke and Trademark Blud who graciously sat on a couch to be interviewed by Rotimi.

There have been elements of the Stereo-Hype Festival that have continued. After moving to Birmingham, the festival was hosted at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC). We’ve grown it in partnership with others. It’s been exciting seeing it develop and be influenced by people with lived experience.

From Stereo-Hype we have this rich data and information about the black experience which has helped to shape drama productions that we have produced. One is Revealed, a play covering three generations of black men exploring their relationship, facging challenges in the community, sexual identity and the impact this has on their relationship.

I’m really proud about developing and producing that play with actor and playwright Daniel Anderson. It had performances in Coventry, Bristol and Birmingham, and stimulated lots of conversations with audiences of predominantly black men with women as well.

We did another play based on this data, through my work with Catalyst 4 Change (C4C), leading to a conversation with another service user, adiaryfromnone aka Jade, who was an actress and wanted to write about the experience of black women. She wrote Rose Ward which we did at the MAC. We also did another play called Close to the Edge by a woman whose son had recently died and was in psychiatric services. She wrote about being close to the edge as an older black woman, and the impact it has had on her mental health.

There is a body of work we’ve created and produced, and we want to continue to do that as it’s always rooted in what we’re hearing from the community and honours those who’ve written it.

Obviously, it’s been a journey. You had a personal experience that became a professional vocation. You’ve co-produced a service, then an arts and mental health festival. You are now a theatre producer, and you also created menologues and femologues which are responsive to and reflective of what is and isn’t happening in mental health systems. They also show where the true expertise lies. Where do they fit in this growing and organic body of work?

Menologues and femologues are still evolving, but the starting point is that they are both about what shapes and influences the mental health and wellbeing of black men and black women, using different art forms such as film. We produced a series of films for menologues and we’ve got one for femologues. We are creating a platform for people with lived experience to share their mental health journey, from mental health problems to recovery. I’ve always been interested in monologues and after seeing The Vagina Monologues years ago I was bowled over by it. It seems like a really simple format, but it’s so powerful.  In a way the format doesn’t matter. It’s about the story and what is the best format for that story to be told.

So people understand just how significant a challenge tackling mental health inequalities are for us amid the four plus decades where our disproportionality continues to be a running story, where would you say we are now? I ask because I think a lot of people only have a broad inkling of the issue, but they don’t fully understand the scale of what we’re talking about and why this work is so important. It’s scary to think where we would be if work like yours, and ours, wasn’t happening.

There are several layers to unpack. How many black people are in mental health services? We continue to be overrepresented in secure care services. Mental ill health continues to increase in all communities and there’s a pressure on mental health services to cope with the demand. There are people who still need local mental health support, particularly if they’ve got severe mental health difficulties, which has been a real challenge on psychiatric services. There’s a real pressure on services to be able to provide support for people in their locality.

There’s still a revolving door syndrome where people go into services, they’re discharged but they don’t always feel that they’ve received all the support they need and so don’t feel prepared for living back in the community. There’s more work that we need to do.

At C4C I’m coordinating a programme called Pathway to Independence that supports people in secure care services to transition back into the community. It’s a new, one year delivery and we’ve had lots of amazing impact on increasing their sense of hope and their reconnection with the community.

There’s a greater understanding of mental ill health in the Caribbean community and, to a degree, in African communities. Stigma is still there, and it’s gendered as well. There’s work to be done to support men to speak more about their mental health, particularly older men. Younger black people are speaking more openly about it and are finding their own solutions for looking after their mental health, whether it’s online or through peer support groups.

It feels like there’s a lot more community-based services, but there’s also a recurring problem that people don’t always know where to go for help. Some people are in the know but there are others who just don’t know what’s out there. We’ve got a long way to go to ensure that people know where they can get help and timely support when they need it.

You mentioned Catalyst 4 Change where you are one of the Founding Directors. You are also a Founding Director at the Red Earth Collective.

Yes, Red Earth Collective is a community interest company and my role as the company director is to develop partnerships, produce and deliver creative activities in the community and psychiatric units. We also support emerging artists and work with theatres and build creative networks.

It’s about using the arts to stimulate conversations about mental health problems and challenging mental health stigma. Over the last four years we’ve been running Stereotype Social which brings together artists with lived experience of mental health problems and explores different art forms to challenge mental health stigma and to support their own mental health and recovery. I have two other amazing directors Nick Schlittner and Helen James and some incredible facilitators and programme managers that support the delivery of those programmes.

Catalyst 4 Change – the West Midlands African and Caribbean Mental Health Hub turned 10 years old last year. Catalyst 4 Change (C4C) was created in response to persistent disparities affecting African and Caribbean communities within statutory health and social care systems, and the controversial custody death of Mikey Powell.

C4C’s core purpose is to transform systems so that they become equitable. Tippa Naphtali and Beverley Stephens are my fellow and inspirational Directors at C4C and we work together as ‘positive deviants’ to ensure that black people and their carers have the right care, at the right time in the right place

I lead on our systems change work, working with statutory services such as mental health services that have a responsibility for the mental health wellbeing community and the people with mental health problems who come into contact with those services.

We’ve got a partnership with Black Thrive Global that has developed an anti-racist systems change approach to ensure black communities are thriving. We also have a partnership with Birmingham Voluntary Sector Council called BIRCH which brings together community organisations and academic institutions across the West Midlands to support community-led health and social care research to ensure that it is more community-centred.

As a black woman in this space, what have been some of the challenges and how do you look after your own mental health because this work involves a lot of unseen emotional labour.

There are challenges as a black woman. Our sense of agency and recognising our worth can be overlooked. There are three black women that lead black mental health organisations in the West Midlands: Pat Johnson, Sandwell African Caribbean Mental Health Organisation, Alicia Spence, African Caribbean Community Initiative and Marcia Jarrett at Tamarind in Coventry. These black women are the unsung heroes. They’re doing the work on the ground and don’t always have the time to look up and be involved in some of the strategic racial mental health inequalities locally and nationally. I think all of us have this challenge of the heavy lifting, doing frontline work, operational management while trying to do the strategic role while keeping the money coming in.

In our organisations, we often assume multiple responsibilities and may not always have sufficient resources to accomplish every task. As a result, we tend to take on numerous duties. We feel a sense of urgency.  And with that we don’t look after ourselves. Although we recognise that we are overstretched, we feel compelled to continue even though we are tired. I don’t find men in this space working in the same way.

The strong black woman trope is alive and kicking in the mental health space and we must address this now. It’s ironic that we’re talking about people supporting their mental health and we don’t look after ours. That must stop. We must make more time for our own self-care.

Find out more about The Red Earth Collective (redearthcollective.org.uk) and Catalyst 4 Change.