We are a campaign calling for radical changes in the way psychiatric services are provided in Manchester. We’ve teamed up with people with lived experience, trade unions, family groups and citizens. We established CHARM in 2020 because of our concerns about the decision to rebuild the Park House Psychiatric Hospital in Crumpsall, North Manchester. We called for a review of the need for a large single site hospital and called for an alternative crisis support service providing place based support throughout the City of Manchester.
Since then, we have developed our own set of principles and demands for future service development in Greater Manchester we call the CHARM Demands that holds compassion, human rights and justice as the essential components of any health care system.
We host and facilitate groups, events and activities for people hearing voices and families and carers and other issues.
SHARE POWER: to prevent the abuse of power
CHARM and GMCDP’s Response to the Oliver Shanley Independent Report into GMMH
In January NHS England published their independent report into the abuses uncovered by the BBC Panorama programme at the Edenfield Secure Unit. Communities for Holistic Accessible Rights-based Mental Health (CHARM) and Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People (GMCDP) find that there are serious omissions in both the findings and recommendations in the report: “Independent Review into the care and treatment provided by Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust” (January, 2024).
This Report Summarises our concerns.
The Manchester Women’s Hearing Voices Group gets £14,000 from National Lottery’s Fund. We’re really happy to tell you the National Lottery will be funding our project following our application to the National Lottery Community Fund.
They are giving CHARM Projects CIC £14660 to help our community thrive.
The Manchester Hearing Voices Network is launching a peer support group for family, friends, colleagues and other community members who are supporting people who hear, see or sense things that others don’t.
To get this group off the ground we are running a series of three workshops. Present ideas based on the Hearing Voices approach. Explore questions people have about hearing voices Talk together about the value of peer support for supporters
WHERE: The Working Class Movement Library event space. Parking and is just behind the WCML itself just off Aldred Street. The space is fully accessible.
- GMMH under scrutiny again: what our Mental Health Trust Watch reveals about persistent failures in mental health care in Greater Manchester
- Paranoia: gaining understanding of useful ways to support a person who experiences paranoia: Online event, Tuesday, March 3rd from 9am to 4pm
- CHARM’s Hearing Voices Workshop, Online event, March 2nd from 9am to 4pm
- Autism Central Expands Guidance to Support Families and Autistic People
- Concern Over Possible Relocation of Mental Health Services from the Rawnsley Building, MRI: A Call for Clarity and Engagement
- Manchester’s Mental Health Services at Breaking Point: What Families and Carers Need to Know
- COMMUNITY BRIEFING: A New 24/7 Neighbourhood Mental-Health Centre – What It Means and Why Manchester Needs One
- CHARM Reflection on re-envisioning mental health care and Open-mic, October 3rd – 4th
- Premature Deaths Among People with Severe Mental Illness in Manchester
- People Are Dying — Manchester Deserves Better: An Update on CHARM Open Letter & Meeting with GM Mayor Andy Burnham
- CHARM plans visit to Ghyll Head Outdoor Education Centre (a little piece of Manchester in the tree covered slopes of Lake Windemere)
- OPEN LETTER – Halt planned restructure of mental health services that will harm the city of Manchester’s most vulnerable
- Greater Manchester’s mental health Trust ‘missed opportunities’ to provide further support to a young woman who tragically took her own life coroner rules
- Nursing student died after gross failure at GMMH mental health unit in Manchester
- Mental health trust that is focus of a landmark Lampard public inquiry into patient deaths says it has “real drive” to improve the service and that “good will come of this”.
