ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Rehabilitation
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1607560
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Recovery College model: state of the art, current research developments and future directionsView all 9 articles
Nurturing Creativity whilst Caring: Participatory Action Research with family carers and a Recovery College
Provisionally accepted
Bryher Bowness1*
Samina Begum2
Sarah Bicknell3,4Lana Samuels2Sudhir Shah2Stephanie Hess5Karen Martin5Debbie Bark5
Claire Henderson1Vanessa Lawrence1- 1King's College London, London, United Kingdom
- 2Independent Researcher, N/A, United Kingdom
- 3Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, Birmingham, United Kingdom
- 4University of Warwick, Coventry, West Midlands, United Kingdom
- 5Oxfordshire Recovery College, Restore, Oxford, United Kingdom
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The benefits of attending Recovery Colleges for mental and social wellbeing are well-documented, but the experiences of family carers (roughly 6-11% of students) are underexplored. Family carers report that attending courses supports their own wellbeing and recovery journeys, but also call for greater recognition and relevant provision from Recovery Colleges.This Participatory Action Research project was codesigned by a Family Carers Advisory Group, an academic researcher, and staff at a Recovery College in England. We aimed to expand Recovery College provision to promote family carers' wellbeing, by coproducing and coevaluating a creative course exploring self-care. We collected data through online feedback forms, fieldnotes, photographs and participatory reflective sessions, and collaboratively explored the family carers' experiences of the course through inductive reflexive thematic analysis.Seven family carers enrolled on our three-part online course Nurturing Creativity Whilst Caring. They shared photographs of the creative and self-care activities they took part in during the course, and gave feedback about what they found helpful and what could improve. We developed three themes summarizing their learning: 'self-care as a family carer is complex, but there are small steps we can take to create time to nurture ourselves', 'creativity connects family carers with others and ourselves', and 'nurturing a creative mindset for caring'.This example shows how Participatory Action Research can be an effective approach to designing courses for family carers in a Recovery College. We explore deeper understandings of self-care whilst caring, and the ways creativity can enable this and have wider reaching benefits. Our findings also add to the literature on implementing adult education in practice in Recovery College settings. Finally, we provide some implications for improving courses for family carers and future research.
Keywords: Recovery college, Family carer, Participatory Action Research, Coproduction, creativity, self-care, Mental Health, relational recovery (Min.5-Max. 8)
Received: 07 Apr 2025; Accepted: 07 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bowness, Begum, Bicknell, Samuels, Shah, Hess, Martin, Bark, Henderson and Lawrence. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Bryher Bowness, King's College London, London, United Kingdom
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