SKELLERN LECTURE & JPMHN LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD 2026
June 11th 5.30-9.00pm. REDMIRES BUILDING, CITY CENTRE CAMPUS, Sheffield S1 2NT.
5.30: Guests arrive, networking
6.00pm Welcome and opening address by evening Chair:
Dr Russell Ashmore, Senior Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing, Sheffield Hallam University
6.15pm Introduction to Skellern Lecture: Dr Celeste Foster, Associate Professor University of Salford
6.25pm SKELLERN LECTURE 2026: Dr Dan Warrander, Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing, Abertay University
7.10 Plaque presentation: Dr Celeste Foster
FOOD AND REFRESHMENT BREAK
8.00 Introduction to Lifetime achievement Award: Professor Mick Mckeown (on behalf of JPMHN), University of Lancashire.
8.10pm JPMHN LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT 2026: Professor Ben Harrigan, Emeritus Professor, Cardiff University
Plaque presentation: Professor Mick Mckeown.
8.55pm Vote of Thanks: Dr Russell Ashmore
Russell Ashmore Ben Hannigan Dan Warrander Celeste Foster Mick Mckeown
Dr Russell Ashmore - Evening Chair Welcome address.
By way of Chair's privilege and as an introduction, I want to say a few things about what I see as the importance of history for the profession and how it connects to this event. So just indulge me for a few minutes before we get down to Dan's talk. So first of all, mental health nursing has got a long and rich history. But to borrow from the author, L.P. Hartley, and the historian David Lowenthal, I suspect for many mental health nurses, our past is something of a foreign country, something that we rarely visit, if at all, and perhaps for some people we don't even know where it is on the map. However, the past deserves our attention. As its ghosts are ever present, they stand clearly behind our practice in the present. Obviously, the past can't be in the present, but its traces are all around us. So, for example, in Sheffield, not a mile from here is Mount Pleasant House that housed 80 patients in the late 1860s before the completion of the South Yorkshire Asylum. Less than two miles from here, underneath the Southern Acute Unit, which is literally built on the demolished asylum wing of the old Ecclesall Bierlow Workhouse. Five miles from here is what remains of the old Middlewood Hospital. And where I started my career on that ward [points to picture of the hospital], Ward 7.
Who knows what ghosts inhabit these places? I'm sure the people who are now living in luxury flats might want to move out if they were aware of some of the practices that took place in wards nine to 13 contained in that building. Lastly, under a field in a church, less than five miles from here, are buried over 2,500 men, women and children who died in the South Yorkshire Asylum, buried in a mass grave. There are barely six headstones that recognises the existence those people. These examples to me are reminders of how our past has shaped mental health care in Sheffield and I'm sure around the country you can find similar examples. And I would argue that if we dare to look close enough at our past, what is going on today is not that dissimilar to what was taking place in some of these places over 100 years ago. I'm convinced in some cases we're going backwards rather than forwards. I do wonder what mental health nurses know about this past. And over 30 years since Peter's [Nolan] publication, the telling of our history and its relevance to contemporary practice is a neglected subject in both nursing curricula and nursing research. There's little over 60 papers been published since 1990 on the subject. However, as Siobhan Nelson has pointed out, historical amnesia is dangerous. It contributes to misunderstandings and myths about past events that potentially negatively impact on practices in the present. It's important that we know about history and that history is not lost to future generations. It needs to be preserved now, otherwise things like this happens [points to picture of damaged archive material] to it to the point it's irretrievable.
Why is it important? Well, history and our past help in the development of our professional identity. It provides a backstory to many contemporary issues. It highlights the roles that mental health nurses have played in mental health care. In addition, an understanding of our history provides a genealogy of the profession of the dominant discourses that have shaped us and hopefully it can help us avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. Knowing our history and those who have contributed to it can also help us to exercise the ghosts of Bedford Fenwick, the ghosts of Nightingale. These remnants of characters outside of mental health nursing are not benign ghosts. They're malign spirits that haunt our profession. They're in our classrooms. They're in our practice. They're in our standards. We need to explore our history, our past and present to get rid of these. They're not our people. They never were our people. They never liked us. We never like them. Perhaps we need to discuss what did Florence Nightingale ever do for mental health nursing?
So that is why the annual Skellern Lecture and JPHMN Lifetime achievement award are important as a living museum of mental health nursing. It connects the past to the present and the present to possible futures.
Skellern Lecture 2026
Dr Dan Warrender, PhD, MSc, MA, PGCertLTA, BN(MH), FHEA. Lecturer in Mental Health Nursing, Department of Health, Sport and Wellbeing, Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences, Abertay University, Scotland.
Burning bridges and the potential of ashes: a regeneration for the verb of ‘mental health nursing’.
Introduced by Celeste Foster. As tradition dictates, as last year's Skellern Lecturer, I have the privilege of introducing Dan as the Eileen Skellern Laureate for 2026. I'm sure you'll all can join me in congratulating him. We can perhaps save the claps to the end, but I know everybody in the room will be pleased for him. Dan, I also want to let you know that your colleagues from Abertay University also got in touch with me to say that I needed to remind you that the whole of the team at Abertay are willing you on this evening and they also wanted to remind you how important you are to them as well as here. Now many of you will know Dan through his work already, through his writing, through his clinical work and through his activism and his research, including but not exhaustively the Mental Health Deserves Better campaign challenging the dilution of mental health education standards and delivery.
His clinical and research work improving the care of people who receive a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and their families and critically engaging and exploring and reconceptualising ideas of risk in mental health care. He's a clinician, an educator, a critical thinker and an advocate in our profession. So, I want to take a moment to share some words of congratulations from colleagues who know him well. So, Sebastian Monto, who also told me I had to say that he was gutted that he can't be here today. A colleague at Abertay University wrote, “Dan is passionate about challenging and shaking up orthodoxies in mental health care. Never shy of speaking truth to power and always up for a deep and very honest conversation about how we might improve services and better prepare the next generation of practitioners. Everything he does is delivered with sincerity, insight, humour and a healthy mistrust of systems.” Professor Mick McKeown, who's in the audience, so if we'd have practised, we could have lip-synced this, “I have to say about Dan that he is that fairly rare creature, an imaginative, radical, critically engaged nursing scholar. He has done formidable work in convening Mental Health Deserves Better campaign amongst other things. And this is not without professional hazard. He has felt employer backlashes at times. In facing up to the various existential challenges that afflict mental health nursing and the people we serve, Dan's scholarship and leadership have been exemplary. And it is heartening to appreciate that with folk like Dan around, the future is in safe, albeit appropriately contesting hands.” So as part of this kind of wonderful tradition, I've been lucky enough to meet with Dan on a couple of occasions in the run-up to this evening and even more lucky to have a bit of a sneak preview of some of the issues and elements that he plans to explore this evening in his lecture Burning Bridges and the Potential of Ashes, a Regeneration of the Verb of Mental Health Nursing. So, I can say two things. One is Dan, when you get to do this bit next year, it's amazing. But for the rest of you, I can confirm that you're really in for a treat. In having the opportunity to talk with Dan just a little bit about his work and his career over the last couple of months, I have met somebody who is full of passion, deep thought and reflections on a profession that he has chosen and loves. Who knows at his heart that the personal, professional and political cannot and must not be split from each other in mental health work. Who understands that to stand up for the distinct role of mental health nursing. He's also to stand up for and stand alongside those who are in profound psychological distress, but that in doing so, mental health nursing cannot be given a free pass for its worst moments and its history as Russell has laid out, and that we all must be accountable and be prepared to learn from that history. He's somebody who understands deeply that honest, critical interrogation of our profession and radical activism for its importance and contribution can be and must be held together in the same space. And somebody who believes that relationships are at the heart of what we do and who knows that they are complicated, containing in them tenderness, beauty, messiness and the power to bring both benefit and harm. A conundrum that all of us who are mental health nurses must recognise, own and wrestle within our work. So, to help us with this task, without further ado, I would like to warmly invite Dan to take centre stage and to deliver his lecture, Burning Bridges and the Potential of Ashes: A Regeneration for the Verb of Mental Health Nursing.
Journal of Psychiatric & Mental Health Nursing Lifetime Achievement Award 2026 - BEN HANNIGAN
Introduced by Professor Mick Mckeown. Professor Ben Hannigan is Emeritus Professor of Mental Health Nursing in the School of Healthcare Sciences at Cardiff University. Ben’s nursing education began in East London where he trained in the mental health and adult fields. Having worked in a community mental health team in Tower Hamlets he upped sticks in 1997 to take up a lecturing post in South Wales, in August 2025 becoming Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University. As a researcher, Ben studies mental health systems and services, taking the view that these are exquisitely complex, interconnected and contested. The collaborative programme of research he has led and contributed to in this area has received significant and sustained funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research, with investigations into crisis care for children and young people, end of life care for people with severe mental illnesses, care planning and coordination, and more. With colleagues he has published widely in these, and related, fields in health and social scientific journals, books and chapters. He remains committed to developing research capacity in health and care, supporting 16 postgraduate research students to completion and acting as a mentor and general sounding board to colleagues. He has examined over 30 postgraduate research degrees in the UK and internationally. A longstanding Senior Fellow of Advance HE, Ben has developed and led education programmes and modules at all academic levels. Active in the profession, between 2019-20 he served as elected Chair of Mental Health Nurse Academics UK, having previously served as Vice Chair in 2017-18. He has led and served on conference committees (including for the International Mental Health Nursing Research Conference) and on editorial boards (including for Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, and the Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing). Sometime in the next few years, with decent boots and a fair wind he will have completed a walk around the perimeter of Wales which began in 2013.
Nominations are open for 2027
Mick Mckeown presented Ben with his plaque
