23 January 2013 
There’s been a bit of a delay in doing this, because I’ve been on holiday, but having recently hosted the TWIM Awards for mental health blogging and the #TwentalHealthAwards for mental health tweeting, it’s now time to open up the floor to feedback on what went well and what didn’t. The hope is that your feedback will inform how these awards are done next year.
Just to get the debates going, here’s a few thoughts from me, for people to agree or disagree with, or elaborate on, or point and laugh at.
1. The TWIM Awards has been going for a few years now. This year we did it slightly differently in that rather than simply a straight vote, we had a nominations round which then went to a judging panel. The #Twentalhealthawards was in its first year of running, and was done on a straight vote. Did people have any views on the two different ways of doing it?
2. The two awards also had two different ways of organising the categories. The TWIM Awards took a fairly “medical model” approach, grouping the blogs along roughly diagnostic criteria (e.g. “Personality Disorder”, “Mood Disorder”, “Anxiety, Stress or Trauma”. By comparison the #Twentalhealthawards used categories like “informative”, “helpful”, “recovery”. The diagnostic approach of the TWIM Awards can be problematic at times – particularly in terms of categorising blogs by people with more than one diagnosis, who feel concerned about being overly identified with their diagnosis, who disagree with their diagnosis, or indeed disagree with the medical model altogether. On the other hand, the “patient experience” category in the #Twentalhealthawards wound up getting very crowded, and breaking it down along diagnostic lines did enable more awards for first-person accounts of different mental health conditions.
3. Although the #Twentalhealthawards went fairly smoothly, given that it was the first time it was run, one category that did run into problems was “professions allied to medicine”. This is a term that refers to professions such as occupational therapists, physiotherapists, radiographers, dietitians – basically the myriad assorted healthcare professions that aren’t doctors, nurses, dentists or pharmacists. Unfortunately I forgot that while it might seem obvious to someone like myself who works in healthcare, it might not be so obvious to someone who doesn’t. As a result there was a lot of confusion and there were nominations in this category for nurses, police officers, academics and other professions that wouldn’t normally be considered a PAM. Hence this category got changed to “occupational therapy” which is the PAM you’re most likely to meet in a mental health context.
4. One thing I probably think we need to sort out for next year is the system of voting by leaving a comment. I’m not entirely comfortable with the non-anonymous nature of doing it that way. The reason it’s been done in this manner is mostly down to a lack of website-building geek-fu on my part, rather than any suggestion that it’s somehow the best way of doing it.
So, over to you guys. What are your thoughts?
There’s your mistake – geek-fu has been replaced by Google-fu. Try Polldaddy plugin for WordPress.
As for my Opinions, well, Ing-gal-land should be for d’ Ings. Like Italy is for d’ Italyians. And like Maggie Thatcher is Muvver to us all, in dis Tecknological age, so smoke that in you Guardian reefer, college boy.
Hi, I’d like to say that although the on-confidential voting may be problematic, I really appreciated seeing where (my) votes came from and therefore being able to thank people for nominating/voting for me. That’s a bit selfish, perhaps, but I just wanted to mention it.
I loved the fact that “we”, the mentalists, had the opportunity to give out our own awards- we’re often overlooked, even in the wider disability movement, campaigners like @Quinonostante and @markOneInFour (and @uk_schizophrenic) should be as well known as @suey2y and @Bendygirl.
The patient experience/recovery categories were very full, but I’m not sure how to re-organise them? I feel that people nominated in the category probably have better ideas than me!
Regarding anonymous vs non-anonymous, I’m wondering whether for next year’s #Twentalhealthawards to have one round of non-anonymous nominating to create a shortlist, followed by a second round which would an anonymous poll using a plug-in like the one Harry suggested.
Could we have a nominating non-anonymous poll as an intermediate stage? Then the second round would become the third, with a anonymous plug-in Opinionator to make one sound like Simon Heffer at a Marxist, Somali Kifbar.
It is great to recognise all the fantastic tweeting and blogging in the mental health sphere so do please keep going!
Like you I’m not so keen on the diagnostic category frame for the TWIM awards and I wonder if you can divvy up in a different way related to the purpose of a blog. So for example some blogs are more self-help/online diary, others are more social/political commentary, others are humour, and then some use photography, art and/or cartoons. If you got a good list of categories like this then you could have one winner blogging from a personal perspective and the other from a professional perspective and then may be one where they are mixed. You could use the same categories for the Twitter awards as you do for the blogs if you went down this route. I think whatever categories you use need some explanatory narrative so people who aren’t familiar with some of the language (including words like recovery) are clear. The other approach you could consider is asking people who nominate to give a brief reason for their suggestion (could just be a sentence or paragraph) and this would then help the judges to make their recommendation.
Just a few thoughts
It has to be said that yes, the PAM section did throw me a bit, just a n00b s’all. Anyhoo, I think the public nomination and anonymous final vote is the best and most democratic way of doing it & to my mind is very fair.
I have to say thanks for getting a runner-up spot. That is also fab and a real confidence booster. Hell I feel a bit of a fraud for even getting nominated, made me blush, that’s for sure.
Also I’d like to say a huge thanks for you guys organising it, I am long enough on t’net (I remember it being text based on green screens), to know what an enormous time-suck these things can be. You guys & Gals rock my world. Thankyou!
I’ve delayed commenting until zarathustra prompted me on Twitter, not because I’m not interested but because I don’t quite know how to respond. So I’m just going to bite the bullet and spit it out….
I was runner up in the Twentalhealth ‘MH nursing category’ and I don’t think I should have been. Please don’t get me wrong – I certainly appreciate it and I see it as a genuine honour that a poll of my online peers thought so highly enough of me. However…
A change in circumstances has meant I’ve been extremely quiet both on my blog and on twitter for months now and I’ve even removed much of my existing online info. For that reason I don’t doubt that other, more active nurses should have been placed above me, all things being equal.
Please don’t interpret this comment as in any way dismissive or ungrateful. On the contrary, I’m immensely grateful that I was placed in the results. I just feel a bit embarrassed about it too because I’m sure others deserved the runner up place ahead of me.
So if I have any comment it would be that the free vote thing, whilst it worked for me (presumably because of past reputation) seemed more than a little unfair. I’d go with the panel idea you mentioned above.
Hi.
Sorry for the delay in responding to this with my thoughts.
Firstly, I want to say what a great job you guys do with these, and it is SO appreciated!
1. On judges for blog awards and straight votes for twentalhealth awards… I don’t have any big opinions on these, but I do think that the way things were done worked well.
2. On diagnostic categories versus other options:
The main point that I would like to make here is that – I see no problem with diagnostic categories providing the blog is actually about that illness, and is not just being put into that category because the blog author has that diagnosis.
For example, I think that the content of the ‘best mood disorder blog’ should be mostly related to living with a mood disorder, and ‘best personality disorder blog’ should mostly be related to living with a personality disorder.
Taking me and my blog as one example…
The blog which I write ‘Beauty from Pain Blog’ won the ‘best personality disorder blog’ award. This felt very wrong to me, and still does.
Why?
Because I don’t consider it to be a personality disorder blog, so why should it get a ‘best personality disorder blog’ award.
I see it as a blog about general mental health / mental illness. There is very little of it to do with personality disorder.
A lot of what I do is awareness raising, suicide related, depression related, and mostly general writing that I think may help people.
So it felt wrong to be given a ‘best personality disorder blog’ award for a blog that is in my eyes not a personality disorder blog.
As it happens, I also have clinical depression, which really is much more of an issue for me in my everyday life… so I thought ‘who gets to decide that this is a ‘personality disorder blog’ when BPD is just one of my diagnoses, and when the blog is not about personality disorder and writes about so much else.
As it happens, it was those who nominated me who decided, because they nominated me in the ‘personality disorder blog’ category. I didn’t say anything at the time… because I thought the judges would read Beauty from Pain Blog and see that it is not a ‘personality disorder blog’ and see that it therefore wasn’t worthy of such an award.
Just my two cents, but just to re-iterate: I don’t generally see a problem with diagnostic categories – providing the blog is actually related to that diagnosis.
And secondly, I was chuffed to get my award either way, and am very, very grateful.
I am still thinking about the anonymous versus non-anonymous voting, and will come back to you about that