World Mental Health Day

This is the second year we have around of the annual World Mental Health Day. This one was an absolutely epic day for us at Arthur Ellis.

Arthur Ellis has committed to building a free mental health service for children cross the country. Referrals have gone up so much in recent years for children and young people that, nationally, approximately 75% of children are rejected from being able to access therapeutic support.

So...we train, we develop technology and we provide 1:1 support to children, young people and adults so we can all become #IndependentFromIllness without having to rely on these over-stretched services. With each product or service we offer, we contribute to offering 1:1 support to these children who otherwise wouldn't be able to access it.

To kick off the day, I was down in London while our wonderful Mentors were in the office supporting people 1:1. I was speaking with the lovely people of OJ Associates following on from an event we did a year ago with them at Dive In Festival.

I spoke about my personal experience with mental health, the struggles of accessing timely help before delivering a snippet of our training, which covered;

• Anxiety - What is it? Where does it come from? What makes it worse?
• What does it feel like? Doing some activities to provoke the sensations caused by anxiety.
• What can we do ourselves to support the symptoms? Using our evidence-based methods so employees can alleviate symptoms and manage.

Better yet, because every training session we deliver provides 8 therapeutic sessions to a child unable to access that support, we were able to put 8 sessions aside for one of these children. Thank you OJ Associates!

Getting back about mid-day, the day turned from business into children and young people as there were GP surgeries in Milton Keynes carrying out bake sales to raise money for Arthur Ellis to put children through this much needed support.

So I headed to the surgeries to thank the amazing staff and saw some residents in the local community bringing in more cakes that they made at home to sell for us. Incredibly humbling to see!

In total, the bake sales raised the children ￡202!!! In cakes! Which is the equivalent of just over 5 therapeutic sessions! Incredible!

After this, I headed back to the office to see the wonderful team and to meet some other people who came in to interview for us to become trainers and had some great conversations with companies about our corporate sponsorship model and how they can get involved to help us support more children with their mental health.

It's brilliant to see how Arthur Ellis has grown and how we are beginning to have an impact to these children and young people who weren't able to access help.

If your organisation might want to get involved with supporting children and young people's mental health, please feel free to get in touch with me.

If you feel like you need to reach out, or know someone that might need that bit of support at the moment, our Mentors can see you in 48 hours of referring yourself to us. You can find out more about what we can do to support you here - https://www.arthurellismhs.com/mentoring/

If you might want to personally help, you can head over to https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/arthurellismhs

Please do want you can to support us! Anything helps!

Here's to another year of mental health becoming more on everyone's agenda!