Listen to our conversation on Youtube here
Listen to the Podcast here
Vignesh Vyas is an Occupational Therapist and Filmmaker. He has distinct careers in both professions and has also combined the two disciplines to run therapeutic sessions with service users, students and staff.
Vignesh initially studied filmmaking, drawn by the fascination of storytelling. He now runs his own film production company, AV2, which showcases a wide variety of his work, including music videos, short films and a mockumentary. Some are funny, whilst others deal with difficult themes such as mental illness or non binary gender identity in Indian culture.
Whilst studying and working in filmmaking, Vignesh was also working in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services as a healthcare assistant and then an OT assistant. This is where he fell in love with the OT profession and decided to study to be an OT himself. To help gain further experience he worked as an OT assistant within acute medicine, and then studied for an MSc in OT at the University of East Anglia.
Since qualifying, Vignesh has worked within social services and in inpatient mental health units. He is currently the Recovery College Operational Lead in mid Essex, co-producing courses for service users to help promote independence, confidence and skills.
Vignesh now combines his skills to provide therapeutic filmmaking. In mental health services he has used this as a tool to support service users and staff wellbeing. These can be group workshops or 1:1 sessions, and usually run for 4-5 days. His students create scripts, learn technical skills and editing, and incorporate goal setting into the process. In learning disability settings he has used role playing within films to help improve activity of daily living skills, confidence and communication.
Vignesh is passionate about the power of therapeutic filmmaking, and discusses how this supports Wilcock’s Doing, Being, Becoming and Belonging theory. By acting out the skills or habits that service users would like to incorporate into their daily routines, they are able to see themselves doing these actions, see the life that they would like to live, affirm that they have already done this through the recording, and watch this back in times of self doubt.
Vignesh also discusses using filmmaking to support the idea of Life Previews, where service users are prompted to consider how they would like their life to be, and then make films about this.
In addition, Vignesh runs filmmaking workshops with university students. These include themes such as their wellbeing, life previews and goal setting, clinical reasoning, service improvement and reflection. He also explores with students how filmmaking can be used creatively in clinical settings, for example to help communicate manual handling techniques to service users families.
In recent years Vignesh has completed a pre-doctoral fellowship where he honed his research skills and knowledge. He completed a project using therapeutic filmmaking to reduce staff sickness in the NHS, interested in how film can influence problem solving and conflict resolution skills. He presented the findings from this at the World Federation of Occupational Therapy conference in Paris. This has led to seeking opportunities to complete a PhD to continue his research.
Vignesh advises OTs interested in a research career to follow their passions, and to start gathering evidence and keep up to date about their interests, so to be prepared for when an opportunity may arise.
Links:
Add comment
Comments