Welcome to the Edinburgh Global Mental Health Collective!
Hello, readers! This blog is an introduction to our new EdGMH Collective site and resource. Here we share a little about our journey thus far, how EdGMH has been continuously shaped by its people–and we welcome you along in the process.
Origins
All the best conversations begin over shared food. The idea for this project, the EdGMH Collective, was no different, emerging during a chat over vegetarian chili amongst those of us in the first cohort of Edinburgh’s Global Mental Health and Society MSc programme. The gathering itself, held in August 2021, was long overdue, obstructed for a long while by the height of the Covid-19 pandemic during which our programme took place. Most of us had never met in person, although thanks to a significant emphasis placed on community during our studies (thanks to our fantastic Programme Director, Dr. Sumeet Jain!), it still felt as though we all knew each other pretty well.
We had all completed our dissertations by then; many of us were off to pastures new. Yet in getting the chance to talk with each other, we realized that a sense of incompletion hung in the air. We had all loved the course and weren’t quite ready for it to end. Many of us felt at a loss–we had immersed ourselves extensively in our critical, interdisciplinary, and cross-cultural modules, diving into a vast array of mental health debates, topics, and issues, case studies, sociopolitical and anthropological theories, practical applications over the world–and yet several of us struggled to find a clear pathway through which we could engage and mobilize our experiences and our knowledge. We knew that this was not an uncommon feeling amongst recent graduates. We wanted to keep our unique curiosities, and our caring community, alive, beyond an intensive classroom.
Thus sowed the seeds of our Collective, a space to connect with each other, share our skills, and build on our experiences so far. In discussing these initial thoughts with Sumeet, we found and garnered support across our own cohort, and then across the cohorts after us, where our ideas for an inclusive resource began to take tangible shape.
The Process (so far)
In Spring 2022, the Edinburgh Centre for Medical Anthropology hosted its biennial conference on ‘Pluralizing Global Mental Health: Care, crisis, and critique,’ with dynamic presentations by a diverse range of international scholars, insightful keynote speakers, and over 200 attendees. It was during this time that Edinburgh’s GMH students also showed enthusiastic support for further GMH projects and events at the University.
The following year, GMH MSc alumni of the first cohort (now PhD students) Shannon and Gill teamed up with GMH faculty Sumeet and Dr. Anna Chiumento to map rough ideas for this resource. We drew inspiration from the logistics and procedures of the School of Health in Social Sciences’ Research Bow, a blog for the postgraduate research community of HISS, meeting with student leads Rea Michalopoulou and Rhys Maredudd Davies to pick their fabulous and friendly brains.
In further fleshing out our plans, we were thrilled to receive an award from the University’s Student Partnership Agreement Fund to support a collaboration between University staff and students. With this award, we have been able to build a steering group involving more students and alumni from across the GMH cohorts to expand our input and create a true collective. It made the project feel real; apart from the great company, stupendous innovation, and really bad handwriting, one of the best things about the steering committee is Sumeet’s penchant for supplying cake! Worst thing, somehow, is getting the technology to work.
We began to get creative. We came up with names and put them to a vote. Everyone loved the EdGMH Collective. Nice and snappy! Mallory, our clever techy, set up a Jamboard. Shivanka, an ace designer, set up a Canva space and she and Lora created some elegant logo ideas.
This past week, we held a second steering group meeting to prepare for the Collective’s launch at Edinburgh’s 2024 Global Mental Health Day on June 7th.
And this is our first post, on our new site! We wanted to share the journey with you and invite you along with us. The EdGMH Collective is one that welcomes and belongs to us all. We will be putting out calls for posts from students, alumni, and staff soon. We want to hear about your journeys, reflections, ideas, experiences, challenges, and whatever else you want to share–in your own words and in your own ways. We welcome visuals, photography, poetry, and anything else that lights your fancy and creative fire in relation to Global Mental Health.
To get involved with the steering group, you can peruse our Meet the Team page and get in touch with Anna and Sumeet, whose contacts are posted there. We are working to set up a separate inbox for this, which we will update to our Meet the Team and Contributors pages once we have.
Thanks for reading our first post! We hope you enjoyed it.
Blog authors: Gillian Batty and Shannon Branigin
