About the Living with Psychiatric Medication Group

The group meet to talk about and act on issues to do with psychiatric medication. We've been going for 2 years and have achieved many things through-out this time. We have had many speakers come and talk to us (psychiatrists, pharmacists, CPN's, solicitors to name but a few!) who feel that they get as much out of the meetings as we do. We have participated in many exciting projects including speaking at conferences, helping set up another group in Nottingham, giving our feedback on a group potentially being set up on a psychiatric ward and holding a ‘drug company paraphernalia' amnesty to open up some discussion about how psychiatric drug companies are advertised.

We meet fortnightly on Friday mornings between 10:30 and 12:30 and currently hold our meetings at the Mett centre (Lee circle in Leicester city centre). We make regular flyers to advertise the dates of our meeting or you can contact us for more details for details by email: LWPM@live.co.uk or telephone: 07549270629.

We have recently become an independent constituted group with a committee, our own constitution and have been successful in winning a small grant to develop our group.
We have many exciting ideas for the group's future and are always welcoming to new members!

One of our most recent projects has been the Drug Company Advertising Amnesty.
We sent out collection boxes through out the Trust and collected as many items as we could (mugs, pens, post-it notes) that had psychiatric drug company advertising on them. We used the collected items for inspiration during art and poetry workshops alongside Brightsparks- a Leicester art based mental health initiative. The items were then transformed into pieces of art designed to stimulate discussion about how this kind of advertising makes us feel and what it might mean.

Why did we do this? Well, we wanted to take action following the refusal of several drug company representatives to come and speak with us about their role. The drug companies felt that coming to speak to the group directly would contravene policies intended to protect 'patient groups' from direct promotion from the drug companies. We wondered what protected us from the adverts displayed on the mugs, pens, post-it notes, clocks, stationary etc that we see every time we saw our GP/Consultant or spent any time on a ward and why this is more acceptable than having a conversation. We wanted to challenge and open up a critical dialogue about drug company advertising. We wanted to highlight the drug representatives interest in selling drugs. We also wanted to explore the relationship the Trust has with drug company advertising.