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…

AN EXCLUSIVE LOOK AT ALL MY CURRENT PROJECTS & COMMITMENTS

Almost everyone I’ve spoken to these past few weeks – but particularly mental health professionals like the Crisis Team and my support workers from Richmond Fellowship – have made some sort of comment on the fact that I’ve been keeping myself very busy recently. And as is typically the way with someone who has a psychiatric diagnosis and is doing lots of things at once, two concerns have been raised on numerous occasions… First, that I’m doing too much and I’m going to ‘crack’, and second; that I’m doing so much as a means of burying my head in the sand and ignoring the fact my mental health is actually still quite poorly. With these comments in mind, I wanted to write this blog post to address them, to provide advice for anyone struggling with these things, but mainly, to bring some excitement for all the things that are currently ‘in the works…’