Who’s it for?
Anyone curious about a fresh approach, including people and families with personal experience of mental distress, frontline staff, commissioners, managers, clinicians, policymakers and Third Sector staff.
Who’s speaking?
Our speakers and facilitators are passionate about transforming mental health and changing the script. All believe that with the right support living a full life after a mental health crisis is possible.
The Art of Us | 30 Nov – 1 Dec 2026, Kingsley Hall, Bromley-By-Bow, London, UK
The Art of Us is a two-day gathering on Monday 30 November and Tuesday December 1 at Kingsley Hall in Bromley-by-Bow, London, and breaking out at Bromley-by-Bow Health Centre. Inspired by intentional, eco and therapeutic communities, we aim to bridge the gap between the ambitions of mental health policy and the realities of practice on the ground.
Ten years after our first gathering in Cardiff, Compassionate Mental Health returns for its 20th learning retreat, bringing together experts by experience, family supporters, clinicians, front line mental health workers, researchers, artists, academics and pioneers of change to explore more compassionate, creative and relational approaches to mental health care.
Inspired by intentional, ecological and therapeutic communities, The Art of Us is a two-day experiential learning retreat that seeks to bridge the gap between the ambitions of mental health policy and the realities of practice, by modelling the values and approaches we’d like to see more of mental health services.
Together, we’ll explore how to create safe, healing environments where people experiencing severe emotional distress or altered states can find understanding, meaning and connection, rather than stigma, exclusion or coercion.
Drawing on contemplative traditions, therapeutic community practice and emerging approaches to mental health care, we’ll consider how dignity, belonging, purposeful activity and genuinely therapeutic relationships can become the foundations of a more humane psychiatry. We’ll also look squarely at questions of safety, risk and responsibility, recognising the complexities of supporting people through crisis.
At the heart of our gatherings is a commitment to moving beyond Us and Them – the fixers and those who need fixing. We bring together people who might otherwise meet only in a clinical encounter, creating space for dialogue, deep listening and mutual learning, beyond professional roles and illness labels.
Through workshops, conversation, creativity and shared meals, we’ll become a temporary, or pop-up, therapeutic community …. not simply discussing the conditions that support healing, but putting some of them into practice.
Our guiding principles remain choice not coercion, compassion not control, and the belief that even the most difficult experiences can become meaningful turning points.
Ultimately, we want to help inspire a mental health ecosystem built around connection rather than isolation, relationship rather than control – safe, healing services that people want to use when they are in crisis, and that do not lead to moral injury and burnout for those that work in them too.
Join us at London’s historic Kingsley Hall, with workshops at the pioneering Bromley by Bow Health Centre, and on the December 1 we are delighted to invite you to a celebratory Feast and showing of the award winning Film, My Word Against Mine, at the Limehouse Library Hotel.
Together we’ll explore new ways of thinking about service provision, and explore approaches that are based on mutual support, safety and democratic principles.
As always, moving away from professional, personal and illness labels so we can build common ground and imagine together safe, healing focused services.
Register Today and join us in changing the conversation around “serious mental illness” – challenging stigma and raising expectations.
