From its comparatively humble beginnings as a one-day World Mental Health Day community celebration, Liverpool Mental Health Festival has developed organically over the last 4 years. In 2018, it rightfully established itself as a hub of high quality music, art and creativity. Working with Liverpool Mental Health Consortium, we gave a make-over to firm Festival favourites such as the Art Exhibition and embedded them, along with a number of first-time events, into an exciting 5-Day Festival programme.

With Festival Enhancement Funding from Culture Liverpool and Public Health Liverpool, we could put together a programme with artists from Liverpool and further afield and include work that we commissioned especially for the Festival.  The funding was granted given the past successes and helped raise the profile of the events immensely.

For the first time since its inception, the Festival kicked off with an Opening Night. Hosted by the Liverpool Phil Music Room, the event showcased Liverpool Mental Health Consortium’s work with diverse festival partners such as Africa Oye and Liverpool Irish Festival and boasted music, dance, readings and performance art – a massive success.

‘Articipation, A Wellbeing Forum for the Creative Industries’, taking place at Constellations, was also new concept, conceived with the creative industries and their pressures in mind. The Forum in the afternoon tabled challenges and myths and enabled the participants to look for solutions together. The evening was given over to free gigs with headliner Stealing Sheep.

‘Probably the best mental health festival in the world‘. Clare Shaw, poet, performer, tutor, trainer and keynote speaker at ‘Articipation’.

Other events included the Festival Film Night at FACT showing an excerpt of LFC TV documentary ‘Jason McAteer: Through the Storm’, about mental health in football and society and the TranScripts Showcase, giving the participants of the TranScripts Creative Writing Project a platform to read their work.

Check out the full programme here.