One in Four Conference on Moday 1st February: Are you coming?

So, our conference is on Monday.

You can find all of the details here including details of the guest speaker I was hinting about it the last post…

Alistair Campbell! He’s a big supporter of Time to Change and has been doing a lot over the last year to change people’s ideas about mental health difficulty and the people who experience it.

I think one of the most value things that he has shown is that there isn’t a division between people with mental health difficulties and professionals, be it professionals in politics, in the professions or in the media. You’d be surprised at the amount of charity, public sector and private sector professionals that we run into who have a mental health difficulty. It’s like a secret club, spread across workplaces throughout the country.

The reality is that there is no ‘us and them’ when it comes to mental health difficulty. Any group will contain people with experience of mental health difficulty, regardless of how much it might protest that it does not. What needs to happen is that the people in that group need to feel safe and supported enough to come forward and begin to change the culture of a group.

We want to help support the beginnings of this process in the media with our conference.

It's awful to be stereotyped by people who should know better. It's time for a new way of dealing with mental health in the media. At least one in four people will experience a mental health difficulty. That means a quarter of the audience for any television programme; any radio show or any newspaper will have experienced mental health difficulties in their lives, or will know someone who has. We need to make sure that we stop offending people, spreading myths about mental health difficulty and making people scared to reveal the problems that they are facing.

We need to get beyond a culture of just complaining, which can change particular situations but often doesn’t touch the culture that creates them. We need to get beyond saying 'oh dear' or working ourselves into a moral lather. People with mental health difficulties need to work with organisations and producers to make sure they get it right and producers and organisations need to accept that and make it possible.

Our conference will be bringing together people to begin just such a discussion. It’s about working together, whether it’s with public sector organisations, the voluntary sector, the media or just in everyday life. People with mental health difficulties need to be at the heart of the production of messages about mental health difficulty.

If one in four of us experience mental heath difficulties, no one who produces materials for public consumption should ever use the excuse that they couldn't find anyone to talk to about the issues or the best way to discuss them. There’s thousands and thousands of us out there, just waiting to be asked what we think, what we’ve experienced or how something affects us.

When everyone meets halfway, then we'll be getting somewhere.

Looking forward to meeting you all!

Get you last minute places for the conference here

Image from Alastaircampbell.org