Let's talk about Mental Health - Part two.

I have facilitated many workshops, given lectures and had any number of public speaking engagements.  I’ve always delivered these on my own - Up until this week. On Thursday
I co-delivered a workshop for the first time. It was the first of my “Let’s Talk About Mental Health” workshops and my co presenter was an amazing young woman by the name of Ruth Fox. 

Ruth is a 19-year-old mental health advocate, footballer, author and public speaker. She is a rising star on Social Media (over 6,000 Twitter followers already) as well as appearing on traditional media including, Sky Sports, ITV, BBC and local radio. 

As those of you who follow my blog know, I am an inclusion coach with over twenty-five years’ experience working with hard to reach groups, including people experiencing mental health challenges. I ran a local authority program called “Invigorate” for nine years. This program utilised sports and physical activity to support mental health service users. So, I like to think that my experience in this field gives value to all my workshops. However, to have the inspiring story and life experience that Ruth brought added powerful context to the narrative and made for a wonderful first joint workshop. Having come through her own difficult experiences with depression, Ruth aspires to raise awareness of mental health across all sectors and particularly wants to focus on the Education system, the Mental Health system and raising awareness of mental health in sports coaches. 

So, she is an ideal partner to work with.
The combination of my experience
“working”  with the challenges and Ruth’s experience “living” with the challenges made for, I believe, a powerful workshop.  

We began the workshop by looking at how people view physical health compared to their attitudes towards mental health. Why do we take a person’s physical health for granted, yet talking about their mental health is a big taboo?

We covered many of the common and well-known mental health conditions and discussed the shocking statistics around the subject of mental health.

I person every 40 seconds in the world takes their own life.

800 million people face the challenges of depression worldwide.

84 men in the UK take their own life a week, that's 12 every day, 1 every 2 hours

Suicide is the biggest killer of men U50

1 person takes their own life every 90 mins in the UK.

We also spent a lot of the workshop discussing attitudes to mental health, particularly in the mainstream media.  It’s frightening that over a third of the public think people with a mental health problem are likely to be violent and headlines like these don’t help. In fact, people with severe mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, rather than perpetrators, of violent crime.

An interesting part of the workshop was where we explored the use of language. We asked the question, Does the language we use influence our attitude towards people with mental health conditions? Can it lead to Stigma?

It’s so, so important to be having these discussions. Only by talking about mental health openly can we ever hope to end the Stigma. 

Ruth and I plan to deliver more of these workshops and dates, times and venues will be announced soon.  

In the meantime, feel free to contact me for information on the workshops and thank you for checking out this week’s blog post.

See you all again next week.

Stay safe.

Steve Morley
Inclusion Coach