I was delighted to be interviewed on BBC World News Live with Lucy about mental health in the workplace. Within the time I also got the chance to speak about the voluntary peer support work that I do through founding in2gr8mentalhealth, a forum for mental health professionals with lived experience of mental health problems. I set up the forum after my own experience of a mental health breakdown in 2015 and recovery, in order to provide support to others and campaign to destigmatise mental health problems within the mental health professions themselves.
All humans can go through difficult and distressing events that can understandably lead to a mental health problem at any point in our lives. When it is understood that people have a narrative as to how they came to be in pain, that narrative can bring people together and battle the isolation that stigma creates.
My work intends to bring down barriers and open up conversations about mental health. I believe firmly in our common humanity and that the mental health professions themselves have a responsibility to be a beacon of destigmatising through modelling an openess about their own lived experiences and recoveries. This can instil hope, acceptance, support, compassion and normalisation of all of our human experiences.
I run in2gr8mentalhealth voluntarily using donations and funds from part-time lecturing on this subject on clinical psychology training courses, and developing a guide with a team at UCL Unit for Stigma Research on the supporting and destigmatising of lived experience for clinical psychology training community.
The in2gr8mentalhealth website and forum is temporarily down, in redevelopment, as the platform has become too large for me to manage on my own on a voluntary basis. I am planning the next evolution of it.
If you wish to support in2gr8mentalhealth via donation or if you are an app developer interested in digital mental health, please get in touch with Natalie at contact@in2gr8mentalhealth.com, Iwould be delighted to hear from you.
We are all in this together, peer support can help, nobody should feel alone!
Many thanks to Lucy Hockings and BBC World News for their interest in covering mental health in the workplace through commissioning the recent Deloitte report, and for their interest in my destigmatising work from within the mental health profession itself.
You can find the work of the UCL Unit for Stigma Research here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/research/clinical-educational-and-health-psychology/research-groups/ucl-unit-stigma-research-uclus
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