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Mind & Culture

PROJECTS

By Karnacology Editorial Team · Jan 20, 2016 · Updated Aug 8, 2026

Mental Fight Club (MFC) was founded by Sarah Wheeler in Southwark in 2003, as a creative force for change led by service users. The group has been running pop-up creative events since 2003 to explore issues around mental illness, recovery and wellbeing. These varied events play to packed audiences, using creativity to break down the barriers between the ill and the well, the supporters and the supported. In this way the group hopes to “open everyone’s mind to the wisdom and riches that can be gained in the journey through mental illness into recovery”.

Read more about the remarkable story behind the organisation in our Mental Fight Club project page.

Mental Fight Club and the Dragon Café

Mental Fight Club’s best-known creation is the Dragon Café in Southwark — a pop-up café run as a calm, creative space where anyone, with or without a diagnosis, can eat, make things, and talk. The group takes its name from William Blake (“I will not cease from Mental Fight”), and its founding idea has stayed constant since 2003: recovery is something people do together, creatively, in public — not something done to them in private.

Kids Company

The second project documented in this section is Kids Company, a children’s charity founded by Camila Batmanghelidjh in 1996. It supported vulnerable inner-city children and young people in London, Bristol, and Liverpool. Karnacology covered its work, including its Christmas campaigns, while the charity was active. Kids Company closed in August 2015 amid a widely reported funding controversy. The project page remains here as an archival record of what the organisation did. It also shows why mental health publishers thought it worth supporting.

Why These Pages Are Kept

Both projects embody the idea that runs through this whole archive: that mental health care is broader than the clinic. These pages are preserved as they stood, with light editorial context added, because the questions they raise — who leads care, where it happens, and what creativity has to do with recovery — have not gone away.