Mental Health - Who’s left behind?
BrightSparks’ Managing Director, Andy, has been thinking about the progress made in relation to mental health awareness and those being left behind.
All my social media news feeds are packed with content about mental health at the moment which is a great thing. It feels a bit like, as a society, we are reaching a watershed moment where people that have mental health problems are viewed in the same way as people that have physical illness or conditions.
Wouldn’t it be great if the public and the NHS’s reaction to someone saying that have a mental health problem was the same as if they had told them that they had broken their arm? We don’t make folk that rock up at the doctors or A&E with a suspected broken arm wait months for treatment do we?
Likewise, people don’t usually chastise people that have broken limbs as “hard work” or “a bit nuts” when they display the symptoms of their injuries. I don’t think we are quite there yet but it’s not an impossible dream anymore for sure. However, having said that, I do think that there is a real danger that there will be parts of society that are left behind in the realisation of this dream. Why do I think this? Read on....
Mental health is something we care greatly about at BrightSparks. Take our work on emotional resilience that we are delivering at the moment across York and North Yorkshire for example. We are helping children as young as 5 and 6 as well as teenagers and parents to understand their emotions a lot earlier so that they can make good decisions about protecting their emotional well-being and mental health. This way, they will be better able to deal with situations later in life that could cause them to develop mental health problems.
Through this work we have been working in some disadvantaged communities and with children, young people and families living in poverty. What we are learning is that this group feel like the language, vocabulary and concepts of the mental health agenda have been captured by a largely middle class and predominantly female group. The result is that they struggle to identify with the populous outpouring of mental health content that is dominating newsfeeds.
To young boys from multigenerational workless households, the concept of good self care is as alien as a tofu salad. But the statistics show that these are the very boys that turn into young men that are committing suicide at a faster rate than ever in history.
We need to work out a way to communicate concepts like self care, trauma, emotional intelligence, attachment, anger, loss and grief instead of labelling them “hard work” or “angry” kids. Otherwise, these groups of people will never rationalise mental health problems in the same context as other illnesses and conditions and we will further exacerbate the health inequalities that those living in poverty experience.
BrightSparks is committed to achieving this through our emotional resilience and other programmes. But, we are small (right now anyway) and the scale of this problem is massive. If we have any chance of taking everyone with us on this mental health revolution, we need Government to recognise that mental health provision needs to be a staple of the curriculum and given the same public health platform as healthy eating and physical activity have been given.
Find out more about our Emotional Resilience Programme.