MY JOURNEY FACILITATING TRAINING IN MENTAL HEALTH WITH ADVICE TO HELP YOU DO IT TOO!!! | LAUNCHING UNDERSTAND WITH IND

“The great aim of education is not knowledge, but action.”

Herbert Spencer

A number of years ago, I was asked to co-facilitate mental health training for the new recruits of my local Police force (Northumbria Police) in partnership with Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust (CNTW). It was my first experience of doing something like that, but it remains one of the most enjoyable, influential, and educational opportunities I’ve ever had in the entirety of my blogging career! So, since then, I’ve gone to take on a number of additional, similar commitments and with those experiences and a recent decision in mind, I have created Understand with IND and its five Training Programmes. To launch it and acknowledge its feature in the brand-new pages on I’m NOT Disordered, I’ve put together this piece which is full of accounts of my experiences in facilitating training around mental health as well as things I’ve learnt from them, and advice I would give to budding facilitators…

MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS WEEK 2018 WITH I'M NOT DISORDERED | POST TWO | MY FIVE MOST STRESSFUL MOMENTS

https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/campaigns/mental-health-awareness-week

1.     EXAMS

Taking exams – no matter what level (whether they’re A Levels, GCSEs, or NVQs) it’s almost as though the entire point of them is to stress you out! Around exam time there’s always a lot in the media about the pressure that our young people are being put under through the

education system. There’s been so many stories of young people developing eating disorders, anxiety disorders, and even attempting – and sometimes succeeding at) suicide. For me, my levels of stress during my GCSE exams were worsened by the fact that I was being abused at the time of the revision and that person did everything in his power to cause me to fail. During my A Level exams, I’d begun to hear voices literally a fortnight before my first three exams. I recognise that neither of these experiences are the ‘norm’ but they are also the reason why my exams were one of the most stressful times of my life.