From Harry, William & Kate’s Heads Together Campaign and thousands of runners in this year’s marathon, to high profile business professionals discussing their own experiences of mental illness, mental health has never been such a widely talked about topic. But what does this mean for you? Here’s our top 5 mental health resources…
It is changing but many don’t feel particularly comfortable discussing mental health, and for most, their understanding is limited to seeing people in 2 camps, those with mental health “problems” and everyone else.
Often people see mental illness as a type of disease, something that should be avoided and something that has a heavy weight of shame attached to it.
The aim of this blog post is to pull together a range of excellent articles and resources that can help increase your understanding of mental health, challenge some misconceptions and illustrate why it’s such an important topic for all of us.
Just as with many health challenges in the last 100 years, education and understanding can both save lives and vastly improve the quality of them. Just think how little stigma there is attached to the topics of cancer or sexuality now, compared with 25 years ago. Understanding mental health is vital and incredibly liberating.
1) Let’s start with an intro to the basics
Here’s a video by the excellent Mental Health Foundation:
2) The long read
A personal blog post written by Paul Kirby, a Visiting Professor at LSE and Non-Executive Director at the Cabinet Office in the UK Government. His career has included being a partner at KPMG and Head of the Number 10 Policy Unit. The post covers a range of issues but was is particularly brilliant is his overview of how we view mental health and all the different ways it has been framed and used / manipulated by those with vested interests. Stick with it, it’s long but very enlightening.
https://paulkirby.net/2016/12/07/on-mental-health-weve-got-it-so-wrong-money-alone-cant-fix-it/
3) Practical Advice
It’s quite possible the reason you’re reading this blog is because you’d like some practical advice for supporting a mate, a young person, a colleague or a loved one. Here’s some great resources from a number of organisations:
4) At work
It’s also possible you’re interested in how you can make your workplace a better environment when it comes to mental health – especially as this year’s World Mental Health Day theme is “mental health in the workplace”!
Check out these latest toolkits and super practical information from Business In The Community:
https://wellbeing.bitc.org.uk/all-resources/toolkits/mental-health-employers
5) Stress & Decision Making
Finally, have a quick read of this highly-accessible article from the Harvard Business Review about stress and decision making:
https://hbr.org/2017/10/manage-your-stress-by-monitoring-your-bodys-reactions-to-it
With so many of us feeling stressed, it’s really important to understand what it is, how it can negatively affect you and how you can both tune into it and manage it better.
We hope you’ve enjoyed finding out more about mental health, being resourced with up-to-date information and useful infographics, and feel more equipped to engage with the topic and the people around you more.
Want more or you’ve got a specific question? Just drop us a line.
