It's Mental Health Month at Poached Creative!

This month we’re focusing on creating a mentally healthy workplace in the office. 

We were inspired to look at mental health due to our recent work on Free Minds, a youth-led campaign to raise awareness of how mental illness affects young people. We've also been inspired by our work on Off Centre’s Tackling Gang Violence report, which looks at the psychosocial issues behind gang violence, and our Oii My Size project – a youth-led website that tackles healthy relationships for teenagers.

It’s an important and common issue, with 1 in 6 people working with a mental illness at any given time, and absenteeism due to mental illness costing £8.4 billion annually to UK employers .

Our experience training unemployed and disadvantaged people in communications, many of whom experience mental health problems, have shown us the positive difference that meaningful work can have in people’s lives. Many of our trainees go on to volunteer or work in our office, becoming a valuable part of the team. 

So we’re confident that our office can support people with mental illness – but we want to be the best we can be! So we asked Twitter how to create a mentally healthy workplace.

We had a great response, with people advocating:

* flexibility,

* looking out for and respecting one another, and

* confidential support.

Here are our favourites answers from Twitter:

@poachedcreative ...Promote an open and honest culture in which you engage and support your staff
— NHS Employers (@nhsemployers) June 20, 2013 

@poachedcreative Mentally healthy workplace? Flexibility, giving a sh*t about each other not just outputs, solving problems, caring...
— Markoneinfour (@MarkOneinFour) June 18, 2013

Hi @poachedcreative ooh, it would be difficult to pick just one! Have a look at our top tips for healthy workplaces: http://t.co/weRJUd1Ziu
— Mind (@MindCharity) June 18, 2013

What’s your top tip for creating a mentally healthy workplace? Tweet us @poachedcreative

Twitter, the NHS and other stories

The US healthcare debate and the UK's backlash with the We love the NHS campaign has finally prompted me to join the Twittering masses.

I've been keeping an eye on Twitter for a while now - any communications tool that can mobilise the country in support of our most simultaneously loved and loathed institution deserves some attention.

There are several things that strike me.

1. Even though it looks like it's aimed at nine-year-olds, it's companies that use it most. It suprises me that so many professionals, academics and media personalities take it seriously. (OK, I'm not really surprised about the media personalities.)

2. Its best use seems to be to let people know about something really interesting that they don't know about yet. Why, then, so many people use it to tell their friends what they had for breakfast is beyond me. (But they do - oh yes they do.)

3. It's got tremendous potential as a democratising technology - a free and open platform for anyone to have their say in 140 characters. Basically it promises many of the things the internet promised and didn't quite deliver back in the dotcom days. I love it when people take hold of a technology and turn it to their purposes (so often it's the other way around!) and Twitter's use as a campaigning tool is particularly interesting.

So, I've decided to venture out there into Twitterland, tweeting as my professional self to share links and ideas that might be of interest to people who care about similar things - social enterprise, media, the NHS, unemployment issues, homelessness, good employment practice and such like.

You can find me at www.twitter.com/jessicatsmith

Don't worry, I've only posted one thing so far and I certainly won't be bothering you with what I had for breakfast.