Why should you be listening to me?

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.

Now, I've worked in mental health for 20 years, it's a family business. My father is a psychiatrist, and was one of the first in the country to specialize in stress, anxiety, depression, and also spent his time putting mental health programs into organizations.

So we come from a family business around mental health. As I've mentioned, there's been an explosion in mental health in the last 10 years, which we think is absolutely brilliant. And that 10 years ago, you would get laughed out of an organization for even talking about mental health and stress. What we're seeing though, is the downside of that now, I think, in that we're talking a lot as a society, but actually, there's not really any practical movement, we're not having more NHS services, and a lot of organizations want to tackle mental health, but they don't actually really know what to do. A lot of them are lost, a lot of them are stuck, a lot of them are doing well meaning activity, but it's not really thought through or structured into a comprehensive strategy.

There's a lot of well meaning intent, but actually, I don't think there's a lot of expertise or that the mental health market has matured enough for people to really know and understand what they're doing. Likewise, the rise of the mental health expert, which you've been discussing in the last couple of weeks means that there are more and more people selling services as experts.

But as often they don't have the skills either. So what you're seeing is me starting to talk about this. My intention is to share over the next few months and on a weekly and monthly basis different topics talking about different areas of health, mental health and wellbeing. I'd like to share my experiences of knowledge of 20 years of putting in health and mental health programs around police forces universities at large corporate and startups.

But I also want to start a conversation around some of the negative sides of this explosion in mental health that we're seeing, get people really understanding what needs to do and how to get a discussion going argue with each other, discuss politely what we need to change and actually move mental health in the UK on both in terms of government strategies, how companies look after their people, and in terms of how we as a society look after it.

So join me in the guts to come we'll be talking different areas and next month we'll be looking at why your mental health strategy is likely to fail.

Do you want support and guidance with an expert in the field? Mentorship with Amy McKeown is available - check out more info HERE