Date : 06/11/2025 | Time : 7:00 pm - 8:15 pm |
There are many reasons for the increase in mental health problems, including the impacts of the Covid pandemic, but can we find better ways to improve mental health. Can the nourishing aspects of music, literature, and art be used to improve the well-being of all? Could better funding for the arts and humanities help us address the growing concern about mental health?
In a 2024 IPSOS survey, mental health is now the ‘illness’ which the largest number of people (54%) in England, Scotland and Wales say is a worry, overtaking cancer, the lead in previous surveys. NHS services are experiencing increasing demand.
Whilst the new government has said that Arts and the creative industries will be a key part of the government’s drive for economic growth, years of austerity and an educational focus away from arts and humanities. have left funding at low levels, and education opportunities reduced. English Literature A levels have reduced from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 in 2023 and applications for humanities subjects at universities are reducing, leading to cuts in academic departments. Funding for the Arts has been massively reduced; grant-in-aid and lottery money to the arts has fallen in real terms by £178 million between 2010 and 2023. Arts Council England’s (ACE) budget was trimmed by around 30% over the same period. The arts have fared little better under the devolved administrations.
Harkness Fellow Gwyneth Lewis will lead a conversation between Harkness Fellows Dr Mary Docherty, Katrina Porteous and David Rossington followed by general discussion with participants.
Moderator
Gwyneth Lewis MBE (HF 1982-84) was brought up Welsh-speaking in Cardiff and went to America as a Harkness Fellow, studying writing at Harvard and Columbia Universities. After completing a doctorate at Oxford, she worked as a television producer at the BBC before going freelance. Gwyneth wrote the words on the front of the Wales Millennium Centre and was Wales’s first National Poet in 2005 and has recently published her tenth book of poems, First Rain in Paradise. Her most recent non-fiction book Nightshade Mother, A Disentangling (2024) describes the effects of being emotionally abused by her mother and was awarded a Wales Book of the Year and has been shortlisted in the Literature category of the 2025 Sky Arts Awards. Sunbathing in the Rain (2005) is a book about depression. She teaches regularly, including online for The Writing School and the WISE programme of NHS Wales, was a Visiting Lecturer at Princeton and, in the last few years, has been Artist in Residence at Balliol College, Oxford.
David Rossington CB, (HF 1980-82)) is a Commissioner and Senior Independent Director for the Gambling Commission, and Deputy Chair of the Advisory Committee on National Records and Archives. A former senior civil servant, he worked for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), including as Finance Director and acting Director General. He is Vice Chair of a charity for veterans (The Stoll Foundation). He has been a trustee of an Oxford charity – Arts at the Old Fire Station – which gave homeless people the opportunity to create art as part of the rebuilding of their lives. David holds a degree in History and French from Balliol College, Oxford, a Masters in Public Policy from the Kennedy School, Harvard University, and an economics MSc from Birkbeck College, London.
Katrina Porteous (HF 1982-84) is a freelance poet and historian, specialising in work on the theme of ‘nature’ and ‘place’. Graduating in History from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, she studied creative writing at Berkeley and Harvard Universities on her Harkness Fellowship. She lives on the Northumberland coast and is President of the Northumbrian Language Society and the Coble and Keelboat Society. Katrina led poetry workshops in a wide variety of community settings for three decades, from Shetland (1996-7) to Newlyn (Cornwall) as well as across Northeast England, from schools to retirement homes to mental health groups. She has published four collections with Bloodaxe. The latest, Rhizodont (2024), explores aspects of extinction, change and survival at a local and planetary level. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and is among five finalists for the Laurel Prize 2025.
Dr Mary Docherty (HF 2018-19) is the National Clinical Director for Adult Mental health for the NHS and is a Consultant Liaison Psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust working at King’s College Hospital. Her background includes training in social sciences and organisational consultancy. She has held policy roles with the Department of Health, NHS England, the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE), and London’s Healthy London Partnership working on national and regional programs tackling inefficiencies and inequalities at service interfaces for individuals living with mental ill health. She has policy, research and clinical expertise in service integration including research in integrated mental, physical and social care as a former Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy at Columbia University, New York.
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