Why your Mental Health Strategy is likely to fail… sorry! (1/4)

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 over the years, and they are generally collections of activity. So at the moment, we're seeing a lot of mindfulness, Mental Health First Aid, sort of spattering of really well meaning well intentioned activity. But it's not what I would call a strategy. And often the person who has written it doesn't actually have any health or mental health skills.

What does a good mental health strategy contain?

Well, a good mental health strategy needs to be end to end, you need to have education and literacy training. So that can be all sorts of things like webinars, mental health, first aid is very good for literacy. It needs to be talking about and raising the general awareness of your population as to what health and mental health is.

The next stage is what do you do for people who are in the early stages of a house or mental health condition, you need to have providers set up for that. But more importantly, and the bit that's often missed, is you need to train up HR and senior people in the organization to understand what to do with people and get them help quickly before their problems get worse.

And the final piece of the jigsaw is what do you do for people who are really unwell. When I work with organizations, we look at what health care providers there are, that can include the NHS, if you've not bought one yourself, we make a really clear care pathway for people who are identified as ill.

So why is your mental health strategy likely to fail? Probably because it's not a strategy. It's collection for our activity? Probably because it's not measurable, probably because it stands alone from HR policies and processes and performance management. And probably because you've not got the right health providers or care pathways in place.

So I would welcome your thoughts on this. You can agree disagree, comment below. And over the next couple of weeks I'm going to be blogging about what I think every good new strategy needs to contain

You can sign up for Amy’s 6-week practical, skills led course on all aspects of creating and implementing an organisational health, mental health, or wellbeing strategy and programme - check out more info HERE