,
10 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
This is a nice thing to launch. I hope that it becomes as well known as NHS Direct once was. But I would really love us to discuss more the gap between increasing your wellbeing to safeguard your #mentalhealth as a personal action and societal actions to reduce mental ill-health
Wellbeing is important to us all. But experiencing a #mentalhealth difficulty can put many of the actions we might take to improve our wellbeing outside of our reach without help or support. It's great to be thinking of first line defence by making change before we need them, but
We have to recognise that preventative measures to reduce the probability that we might become unwell because of our #mentalhealth aren't curative factors when we do. It's not just like 'top up your levels of these important things and you'll be as right as rain'
It's easy to be salty about prevention activities in #mentalhealth if they create the idea that prevention is a substitute for support and care if what you live with hasn't been prevented. Sometimes the problem isn't there's too much prevention but that it isn't deep enough
'Why didn't you do this or that instead' isn't very useful to anyone who doesn't have access to a time machine. That's why it sometimes hurts to run into a prevention message when what you want is a practical support right now, not in a past you can't return to
What I'd like us to do more of is talk about how we take actions to make sure people's lives don't get worse when they do become unwell or distressed. These things tend to be far less about personal actions and more about collective changes. Less about advice and more about help
But preventing mental ill-health by increasing people's knowledge of risk factors they can alter by their own personal actions is a different job to providing more, better and more effective treatments, supports and adaptations when someone has got beyond prevention as an answer
The problem is, in part, that we talk about #mentalhealth as an all encompassing thing. We don't talk about physical like that at all. We 'get' physical health also includes illness, sickness, disability and accept causal factors. In #mentalhealth society doesn't see it same way
I think one of largest, most painful gaps in #mentalhealth is wanting help but receiving advice. Advice first then help if advice doesn't work makes sense from service delivery viewpoint, but when anyone enters into a stepped care model it's often worst it has been for them
People wait until things are really bad before seeking help and services only kick in when they're really bad. Combination of these two factors mean lot of people who need something NOW in #mentalheath have to wait until its worse. (and yes, I know IAPT is meant to change that)
