The author HH Williams said: "Furious activity is no substitute for understanding." The need to help professionals understand the problems of the people they are working with was central to the aims of Community Care award winner Cracked.

The project, which scooped the award in the drugs and alcohol category, is run by east London-based Immediate Theatre, and uses the arts to unravel the experiences of service users with a dual diagnosis of mental health problems and problematic drug and alcohol use.

Jo Carter is artistic director of the theatre, which has been involved in using the arts to help the local community for many years. "We wanted to work where we lived and make a connection between art and the communities we live in and express the problems that exist," she says.

Some time ago, Carter was asked to do drugs work with young people who also had other problems. "I felt then that the arts must have a role to play in helping people to be more open about the reality of drug-taking and to talk about harm reduction rather than some of the more unrealistic messages that were around at the time about just saying no," she explains.

The opportunity to put some of her ideas into practice came when she was working with the local mental health trust and the nurses said it would be really great if the theatre could do some work around people with a dual diagnosis of drug use and mental health problems.

"There was an issue around mental health workers judging people who used drugs, and in some cases feeling they were bringing their problems on themselves," Carter says. Some workers had an attitude that many hospital beds were unnecessarily taken up by drug users, and that somebody else should be dealing with that problem. "One mental health nurse once told me: 'We would be able to cope if we didn't have to deal with people with drugs problems - if we only had to deal with people with mental health problems we would be fine.'"

Meanwhile, drugs workers were feeling that they lacked the training and understanding to deal with users with mental health problems.

The East London and City Mental Health Trust asked the theatre to tackle these problems, and to find a new training technique that would be accessible to workers at all levels across the statutory and voluntary sectors. Carter explains that they needed to educate workers about how clients with dual diagnosis experience life, but also to acknowledge that they caused staff high levels of stress and anxiety. The Cracked project was born.

Cracked is a one-day awareness-raising workshop, and in setting it up the project spoke to many staff and service users to find out what they wanted and needed. Local artist and dual diagnosis service user David Hugo was enlisted to create a series of artistic installations using video, two-dimensional and three-dimensional techniques, and sound. As part of their training day, participants visited the installation, which explored attitudes to drugs from many perspectives and was designed to help them to see life from the dual diagnosis service user's point of view. Themes included how drugs are marketed, how a patient feels about the constant note-taking, the stress of constant poverty, and everyone's need to seek moments of joy.

"One part of the exhibition was called 'Can you hear me?' and consisted of David hidden by urine samples," says Carter.

"We felt it was important to demonstrate how people often feel dehumanised by their experiences."

Another feature was the "out of control room", a room with a bed, old clothes and ashtrays but nothing of value or of hope. Participants were asked to enter the room alone and listen to sounds that suggested sensations of paranoia and alienation felt by a drug users or someone experiencing a psychosis - whispering voices, clocks ticking, someone sobbing and traffic passing through space.

Participants were moved and forced to rethink their attitudes. Their responses were used as part of the day, which also included exercises to help develop networks between the voluntary and statutory sector, quizzes about drugs, and the opportunity to explore case studies. Feedback from participants, who were also encouraged to contribute to a graffiti wall, was taken throughout the day. Overall feedback was sent back to the trust management.

Nearly 500 workers from more than 50 agencies in the east London area have so far benefited from the training which has been well received. Carter believes an important factor is that professionals can come out of their usual team settings and be more open about how they feel. "This sort of training is very useful because people feel able to express opinions and perceptions that they often feel worried about saying within their own teams, because of fear about how they may be perceived," she says.

Cracked has succeeded in turning attitudes around, and service users have said that there has been a marked change in staff, who seem to be developing a broader and less judgemental understanding of the problems faced by dual diagnosis clients. "The exhibition was excellent - raising awareness, tackling stereotyping and stigma, and looking behind drug and alcohol abuse," said one participant.

As a direct result of the success of Cracked, the theatre has just finished running a training programme specifically for staff working with young people with mental health and addiction problems. "We developed this training because more and more people were saying that we are not getting to this problem early enough. They felt they were only working with people once they had reached a point of crisis," Carter explains. The current programme aims to look at the problems faced by young people that, if unnoticed and untreated, often lead on to serious mental health problems and drug and alcohol problems later in life.

"Winning the award was fantastic," she says. "It felt great that this problem has been acknowledged, which is very exciting," says Carter. "We are an arts organisation, and the recognition that the arts are playing such an important role within community care was fantastic. We are not very good at publicising ourselves - we become so immersed in the project. This money will mean that we are able to publicise our work more widely."

The £5,000 prize money is a welcome addition to the theatre's coffers and will be used to promote its work. It is considering creating a Cracked colour brochure about the project to be distributed to other health authorities and voluntary sector agencies to promote the work and encourage other agencies to commission it.

"We are clear that we need to raise the profile of the work," Carter says. "A lot of people are saying we need to take it further into the education sector. As well as promoting to other parts of London we may look at promoting it to school workers - we are touching the tip of the iceberg - and it's about promoting the way the project works and developing it for different sectors." 

The drugs and alcohol category is sponsored by Celsian.