So this month, we're going to be looking at why Talk is cheap, especially around mental health. Now, as we've already discussed, we've seen in recent years a boom in mental health, everybody is talking about it. Every footballer seems to have put a documentary out about mental health, Royals are talking about how it affected them. Business leaders can't wait to share their stories, you've got fewer people not talking about their mental health and doing so.

We are hearing a lot about mental health at the moment. It seems that everyone has an opinion on it, or wants to share their own personal lived experience. Whilst this is a good thing in general in terms of raising awareness and changing the stigma around it, I also have massive issues with what is going on.  

The first is that

This month I’ve been looking into the current dialogue and conversation around mental health. I suggested we might have reached ‘peak talk’ around mental health in that to me, it seems that more celebrities, royals and business leaders are talking about their mental health than aren’t. I also suggested that all this talking isn’t really changing things on the ground for people suffering from mental health conditions. 

I really enjoyed the discussion that followed.

What themes are we going to see over health, mental health and well being in 2022?

Well, this is a discussion that we're all having now, early in January, back after our hopefully restful festive breaks. And the way I see it, there's a number of themes that we will see around health, mental health and well being this year, that needs to be built into strategies and need to be thought through.

In this video, I'm going to share my thoughts on what organisations can do to get over what I cheekily call the post pandemic, no man's land.

What I mean by that post pandemic, we are in an unprecedented time, in terms of the employee employer relationship. So firstly…

At the risk of sounding controversial. This week, I'm going to be making my case for why I think it is time for organisational policies that talk about reducing the stigma and raising awareness of mental health to be moved on. They've had their time they've done their job, they've done great stuff, it's time to move on to a more nuanced strategic approach to mental health.

This week, I'm going to be talking about the procurement of health, mental health and well being providers. And what I mean by this is everything from health insurance and occupational health down to an app.

I think that health, mental health and well-being will become the next board-level agenda item and stay there for the next 10 or 20 years at least.

Now, we're already starting to see well being as an industry creep in, and there's been movement in the ESG agenda from recognising it's just about environment to…

This month, we're going to look at wellbeing and what wellbeing is, if you've ever watched any of my videos or read my articles, you'll see that I always refer to health, mental health and wellbeing. And I do that because there are three very different things.

Over the summer, I wrote a post on LinkedIn about integrity that went viral with over 100,000 views. And it's really got me thinking about the integrity of the mental health industry in which I work. And with World Mental Health Day coming up and conferences and starting this can happen MadWorld I thought this was an appropriate time to do a post about integrity in the mental health industry.

In my video ‘Mind the Gap’ I discussed the need for a ‘whole organisation’ approach to health, mental health and wellbeing. What I see often is that organisations have good wellbeing strategies but that these are in isolation to the how the rest of organisation’s policies and processes run. They sit as a policy on a company intranet, but are not linked into the culture, realpolitik or other ways that ‘business as usual’ is conducted.

This month, I'm going to be looking at Mind the gap. And the gap that I mean is the gap between your excellent health, mental health and well being strategy. And all of the other policies and strategies you've got in place.

What I see is an organisation writing a really good health, mental health and well being strategy that stands alone, but…

When I'm working with clients helping put their health, mental health and wellbeing strategies in place, or I'm out speaking at conferences, I often have people coming up to me, and asking me about how to use technology in their health or mental health strategy.

What I hear a lot is people wanting to buy apps people want to put tech in, and what do I think about it? So this month, I'm gonna be dedicating my topic of conversation to being around technology..

Last week on my vlog, I discussed why I think that HR might not be the right place for health, mental health and wellbeing to sit. I explained that although they should be key stakeholders in it, they might not be the best people to run it.

This proved somewhat controversial with some people, but I stand by my comments. I think that for health and mental…

So this month, we're going to explore where you should run your health and mental health strategy from HR would seem the obvious place. And what I find many organisations do is that they think about writing a health and wellbeing strategy.

Because it's people related stuff, it then gets put down to HR. What we're going to explore

So in the last few years, we've seen an explosion in discussion around mental health. And as someone who's worked in mental health for almost 20 years now, I think this is fantastic. But what we're also starting to see is the dark side of this, we are seeing the rise of the mental health expert.

We have all seen that the health, wellbeing and mental health market has exploded in recent years.

Because of this, it seems to me that every man and his dog is now selling wellbeing or mental health services, consultancy, and expertise to workplaces; some having only received a few days actual training in it themselves. It angers me to see individuals charging vast sums to key note or speak at conferences about their mental health experiences or knowledge, or when people leverage off their illnesses to sell themselves into organisations as ‘experts’.

Last week I posted about the ‘rise of the mental health expert’ and why I find this so troubling. I wrote about how individuals (usually with very well meaning intent) can overreach their mental health skills, knowledge and experience.

I was delighted to see the dialogue this article brought about, mostly in support of my views (but it would have also been ok too if this wasn’t the case). We had some interesting debate about what constitutes an expert (it depends…), whether we should set up a professional body to oversee this work (with extreme caution I suggest), and the difference between the need for compliance and putting off organisations actually doing something…

So if you've caught my posts and blogs in the last month, you'll see that I've been talking about the rise of the mental health expert and why this is potentially a bad thing for our society going forward. I hope you enjoyed my content. And I hope that you've got involved in the discussion whether you agree or disagree, I think it's important that we start talking about these things.

So this month, we're going to be focusing on why your mental health strategy that you've probably spent a lot of time and energy on and are very proud of, is probably not going to work. Now in my job as a mental health consultant helping organizations of different sizes, right strategies, the first thing I ask is, what are you actually trying to achieve?

Because you can't write a strategy unless you know what success looks like. I've seen many strategies