Поэзия пациентов клиники психического здоровья приносит радость пожилым больным в больнице

A SIMPLE poem is helping to brighten the days of patients at the South West Acute Hospital, thanks to a heartwarming local initiative connecting people through creative writing. Each month, 23 poems written by clients at Action Mental Health are brought to the elderly people’s ward at the hospital, where patients are given a different poem to read each day. The initiative, organised by Kindness Postbox founder Nuala O’Toole, began in March and has become another way of bringing people together through writing. Nuala delivers creative writing workshops with clients at Action Mental Health, with their poems then laminated and brought to the hospital each month. “We bring 23 of them a month up to the elderly people’s ward in the hospital,” Nuala explained. “They give out a different wee poem to all of the patients every day, just something different in the day.” For Nuala, sharing the work produced during the Action Mental Health workshops has been particularly rewarding. “For me, it’s such a privilege to be able to share the work of the guys in Action Mental Health because the poetry that they write is just mind-blowing,” she said. The poems have also been displayed in Enniskillen Library and were initially only due to remain there for one day. However, Nuala said library staff later asked if they could stay up for longer because of the response from visitors. “They rang us and said, ‘Look, can we keep them up longer because people are really enjoying them. They’re impactful.’” The hospital poems form part of the wider Kindness Postbox initiative, which began as a way of connecting younger and older generations during the pandemic. What started locally has since grown considerably, with around 60 Kindness Postboxes across the North and the idea now reaching countries including America, Australia, Japan, Sweden and Thailand.