Sense Scotland, the national charity which has 20 years experience of working with disabled children and adults since being set up to support deaf-blind children and their families, is working with former residents to provide an intimate and very personal look at the institutions "up the hill" that served the mental health needs of the Highlands.

The charity is helping 35 former residents in the transition from supported accommodation into their own homes including some with severe and complex communications problems.

Ranging from their late 30s to their 60s, for many the hospitals were the only home the former patients knew, so Sense Scotland is also helping them look back and gather memories of what life in Craig Phadrig and Craig Dunain was like, creating a treasure chest of memories not just for themselves, but for the wider community.

Sense Scotland employs nine arts tutors across the country, but the Inverness project has brought it into a whole new area of the arts — storytelling.

"It's more story-making because it's actually coming from the people we are supporting," said Kevin Harrison, manager of the charity's arts and wellbeing team.

"We were really interested in the people who are moving out of hospitals to make sure we didn't lose their life histories. We've found, particularly working in Aberdeenshire and Aberdeen, that since moving out of hospital people have really grown in terms of their creativity, so we wanted to do something in Inverness related to Craig Dunain and Craig Phadrig as significant institutions within Highland history. It seemed to be an interesting way to do it through storytelling, which is really bringing together a lot of different art forms."

This, he believes, is the first time this sort of work has been done with people with complex communication needs in Scotland or the UK and possibly further afield.

"Everybody who is involved has learning disabilities, but those are wide ranging," Kevin explained.

"Some people can communicate verbally, some cannot. Some have physical disabilities and some don't. It obviously makes it quite a complex programme to put together."

Thanks to support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Sense Scotland is now well under way with its two-year Life Histories project which is encouraging not just former residents, but their families and hospital staff to come together to share their stories about life in the two Inverness hospitals.

The £50,000 lottery award has enabled Sense Scotland to employ storyteller Karrie Marshall and a video maker to record the social history of the two hospitals and Karrie is making use of a variety of techniques to help the former residents tell their own stories.

These include using photographs, storyboxes — where objects are placed in a box to stimulate memory or imagination — drama and visual arts activities, as well as more straightforward interviews and visual recordings.

"We're pretty much throwing our entire toolbox at it," Kevin said.

"It's about finding an individual's preferences and finding a way to help them achieve what they want from the project."

Karrie's background is in arts and social care and using arts to develop creativity. This has seen her work with a number of different groups, including people with mental illness or learning difficulties, giving her some idea of the challenges of working with a group where some individuals may be unable to speak.

"There are lots of different communication needs that people might have," Karrie said.

"They might have developed their own sign language. Other people might use photographs or images, so we just try to find different ways of working with people.

"Some of the stories will be about people's current lives. Some of the stories about the past will come through relatives or the people who worked there, or might come from the service users themselves through drama and those service users who can verbalise."

Karrie Marshall of Sense Scotland (centre) with UBC site manager Hamish Little (right) and soon to be resident of the new development Gavin (left). Iona Spence

Making the project more important and more difficult is the fact that many of the photographs taken of Craig Phadrig were lost as the hospital prepared to close in 1999.

"I don't know if they got destroyed, but I haven't seen any images of the buildings of Craig Phadrig," Karrie said.

"That would really be such a wonderful thing for the users because so many of them go on what they see in front of them."

There are many images of Craig Dunain, however, and participants can get very excited when they see photographs of the place which was once their home. In some cases, participants spent over 30 years in one or both of the two hospitals.

"The hospitals were a very important part of their lives, but also important for the staff as well," Karrie added.

"So many people lived and worked there or knew those places. People have been contacting me, talking about how big a social life there was there and the community spirit. On Wednesdays it was half day closing in Inverness and on Wednesday afternoon there was a dance up in the hall at Craig Phadrig. That was the place to be to socialise. It was a community place as well as a hospital.

"A lot of staff have told us they used to have ward parties. They would switch on a particular piece of music and have a party in the ward. These are small things, but they are significant as well."

At the end of the project in early 2010, the results will be brought together in an exhibition in Inverness, which Sense Scotland also plans on taking to Glasgow.

There are also plans for a smaller exhibition in the foyer of Inverness Museum and Art Gallery in February, partly to raise awareness of the project.

More significantly for the former residents as they move into their own homes, the last of which are currently being constructed on the eastern outskirts of Inverness, the participants will also receive their own mementoes of the project and their time in the hospitals, standing in for the personal effects such as souvenirs and photograph albums which most people have and perhaps take for granted.

"The purpose of the project is to ensure that people's heritage and culture isn't lost," Karrie added.

"It's about people being able to get more of a sense of who they are so that's not lost. We've found some photos of people when they were younger and it's been really special for them to be able to have that."

The project is still in its relatively early stages, but Kevin believes the lessons learned in Inverness can also be used elsewhere.

"We're looking at how the practice is developing, but I'm sure a lot of the things we are finding out we will be able to apply elsewhere," he said.

"Hopefully it will be able to contribute to wider national discussions about storytelling and people being able to talk about their life history."

c.macleod@inverness-courier.co.uk

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