Rethink Politics - the project

The Electoral Commission is funding Rethink to carry out a large scale project about the involvement of service users and carers in the democratic process. This will be carried out in both England and Northern Ireland. The project started in January 2007 and will continue to the end of December 2009.

Rethink are proud to have successfully won such an important bid as research in this area has never been done before. This is a landmark opportunity for Rethink to make an important contribution to bridge a gap in knowledge about reasons why people affected by mental health issues are socially excluded and fail to participate in democratic activities such as voting, which allows people to have a say in how the country is run. We hope to achieve two important things:

• Identify the barriers people with mental illness face in participating in the democratic process
• Increase the awareness, confidence and participation levels of people with mental illness in the democratic process
  
  

Research

• The Research team will conduct an evaluation during the first year. This survey will provide a baseline on awareness and participation in the democratic process of adults with experience of mental illness in both England and Northern Ireland. A follow-up exercise will run at the end of the project to find out whether the training programme made a difference to their knowledge and engagement in democratic activities

We are working with several partnership organisations in order to distribute the Your Shout survey both in England and Northern Ireland.

England -

Mind - local associations
Young Minds
MDF - The Bi-Polar Organisation
Mental Health Foundation

Northern Ireland -

Action Mental Health
NI Association for Mental Health
Praxis
Threshold

Campaigns

• The Campaigns team (in both England and Northern Ireland) will train service users, carers and volunteers recruited from Rethink services as well as other partnership organisations. Training will take place towards to end of 2007 and into 2008. The aim of this is to increase people’s awareness of how local, national and EU democracy is organised and how decisions are made that affect them. Following this, a voter registration campaign will be launched to encourage people affected by mental health issues to register and use their vote.