A TRUE INSPIRATION FOR ORGANISATIONS: EVERYTHING WAYTHROUGH COMMS & MARKETING DO TO KEEP CO-PROUDUCTION AT THE HEART OF THEIR WORK | THE COMING TOGETHER MAGAZINE RE-LAUNCH

“There are people who make things happen, there are people who
watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what
happened. To be successful, you need to be the person who makes
things happen.”

Jim Lovell

I’m incredibly proud and very honoured to announce the re-launch of the completely refreshed Waythrough magazine; Coming Together (which you don’t have to be a service user or staff of the organisation to subscribe to, you can subscribe here: Sign up to newsletter - External or learn more about it here: Coming Together - our community magazine - Waythrough and if you have a story to submit: coming.together@waythrough.org.uk). I’m also very privileged and I feel incredibly fortunate to say that I’m now the Volunteer Lead Content Creator with the Waythrough Communications and Marketing team! In around 2023, I was given the opportunity to work with a local NHS Trust (Newcastle Hospitals) to create their Mental Health Strategy and in that partnership, I created a piece of content around why organisations should be following in their footsteps (you can read it: WHY NHS TRUSTS NEED TO BE FOLLOWING IN NEWCASTLE’S FOOTSTEPS!! | IN COLLABORATION WITH THE NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE HOSPITALS NHS FOUNDATION TRUST | I'm NOT Disordered). The blog post proved to be fairly popular and so I wanted to take that sort of angle for this too and discuss the qualities that the Waythrough Communications and Marketing Department exhibit and use to ensure that co-production is at the heart of everything they do – a massive achievement for a ‘behind-the-scenes’ team to accomplish in mental health services…

MY ULTIMATE GUIDE TO STARTING OFF IN THE COMMUNICATIONS & MARKETING INDUSTRY | MARKING 2.7 MILLION READERS!!!

“It is better to do little things with love than big things without love.”
Lailah Gifty Akita

When my mental health was really terrible (2009 – 2013) a huge mindset which exacerbated my suicidal thoughts and feelings – which led to very genuine attempts – was around the idea that my purpose in life was to kill myself young so as to bring attention to the failures in mental health services. For at least four years, I honestly believed that’s why I’d been put on this earth. And it made me feel hopeless, uninspired, and unmotivated to try to do anything different with my life. Finally, as a sectioned psychiatric hospital inpatient, I had therapy around the mindset (I blogged about it at the time too, you can read it here) and having started blogging just over one year earlier, I found myself able to overcome the mindset and replace it with the notion I’d slowly developed; that my blogging career – and all the good I was achieving with it – was why I’d survived everything. Communications and marketing, that was my passion and my purpose and having that opinion of the industry has led to me being passionate, dedicated, and determined to do well in it. So, as I’m NOT Disordered reaches the 2.7 million readers mark, I thought I’d finally share some of my knowledge and experience in the form of advice about starting off in this industry…