Recent Activities
Mindfulness in schools
Karunavira and colleagues taught a Mindfulness-Based
Stress Reduction course at Dorothy Stringer School in the Spring of 2008.
(See
his essay here). In early 2010 Varndean
school in Brighton initiated an exciting project to train Year 7 teachers
to offer simple mindfulness techniques to their tutor groups. MH tutors
have provided training and we plan to run a mindfulness course for teachers
MBCT for Carers
Having worked with carers since 2005, mainly providing
residential carers breaks (carersbreaks.co.uk),
MH tutors are now running MBCT groups for carers, funded by adult social
care. We ran the first course for Brighton and Hove carers in the autumn
of 2009. We now have funding for more courses starting February and October
2010. We have also run a course for East Sussex carers in Eastbourne,
funded from the Carers Services Development Fund. We are planning another
East Sussex course in Uckfield. We are keen to explore the possibility
of having the effects of these courses researched and assessed more fully
by clinical psychologists.
Community groups
We continue our groups at Evolution Arts centre, Brighton
(evolutionarts.org.uk) and
Sunmerhayes (Newhaven and Lewes) (ncda.org.uk/projects/Summerhayes).Taravajra
has also run three follow up groups for people who have completed the
8 week course.
Training Health professionals
In December 2009 we ran our first training retreat
for 12 health professionals at Rivendell near Uckfield. We have also been
taking mental health professionals as ‘apprentices’ on some
of our courses. We are hoping to offer more training within Sussex Partnership
Trust.
Older People
In partnership with clinical psychologists from the
Neville hospital, Hove (Sussex Partnership Trust) and funded by the Dorothy
Allen research fund, we led a ten week MBCT course for 16 older people
(all over 65 with episodes of depression) in the autumn of 2008. This
was our second course for older people and there are plans to do more.
The results of this course are available now.