It is a great privilege of my wonderful job to see how arts organisations across the UK are offering creative opportunities to people living with mental health issues. I recently attended an excellent session on participatory arts run in Glasgow as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival. This included some of the thirteen arts organisations we had jointly funded as one aspect of our partnership with Creative Scotland. I wrote a blog anticipating these three years ago. Most of these grants have now completed so here is a Cook’s Tour of what we are now supporting from Lybster to Argyll.
Most arts work is local and on a devolved basis but an exception is Counterpoint Arts which works with refugees and asylum seekers and we have funded to work across the UK, including a recent well-attended gathering in Glasgow. We have now produced 12 reports in the ‘Creatively Minded’ series, looking at different aspects of creative mental health and they all include case studies from work in Scotland.
We made several grants to Scottish organisations in last year’s round of funding to increase the participation of men in creative mental health. This included the longstanding specialist organisation, Art Angel in Dundee, as well as the Lyth Arts Centre in Wick, which is embedding artists to work in men’s organisations. We have also match funded Screen Scotland to fund a project run by Tonic Arts to deploy participatory film makers in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital.
Our main new piece of work is to match fund Museums and Galleries Scotland to create a £500,000 pot for grants to Scottish museums to partner with mental health organisations to offer arts opportunities. There is a new and final round of funding coming up but so far we have funded ten fantastic collaborations: The Hunterian in Glasgow; The Wyllieum; The Wee Museum of Memory; Waterlines Museum in Lybster; the University of Stirling Art Collection; University of Edinburgh’s Prescribe Culture; Fife Cultural Trust; Glasgow Life; Campbell Town Museum and the Tonic Collection (NHS Lothian).
An undoubted treasure of creative mental health is the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival and last year we funded a new resource by them, Performing Anxiety, which is new good practice resource for people wanting to make creative work about mental health. We have also supported them to fund work by ten participatory artists as part of the 2025 Festival with fantastic results in Dundee and Aberdeen, amongst other places. I also very much hope that some of the other work we are funding can find a place in next year’s Festival.
We have partnership with all of the national Arts Councils in the UK as they are so central to the arts ecology in each nation. It has been heartening to see how Creative Scotland with more funding has been able to resource more organisations working on arts and health. We have been supporting Creative Scotland to take a careful look at what is happening there in order to develop a specific strategy, which will be helped by the appointment of a coordinator role early next year. There will be a number of events next year, leading to an announcement about the strategy by the end of 2026.
The bad part of my wonderful job is that I always wish we could support enormously more work than we are able to do as a small funder. Even so, I am very much looking forward to my next trip to see more of the great work taking place in Scotland.
