Mental wellbeing and Agile Collective
Background
Mental health is of great importance to us at Agile Collective, and therefore the goal of this policy is to ensure we all have the skills and tools to allow us to each manage our own, and each other's, mental wellbeing.
Some important things to note
- We are not mental health professionals, BUT we can listen, and signpost in compassionate and safe ways
- In the UK the NHS is free, one of your early steps should likely be to use this service, as they will be able to help direct you to where you need to go, and any potential future steps/costs
What we do at Agile Collective
Mental Health First Aid courses
These are strongly encouraged, and there is no limit as to how many individuals can be trained at any one time. If you are interested, please take a look at the Mental Health Training resources page.
Please contact the People Circle if you are interested in doing one.
Buddies
This is often on a request basis, but buddies can be set up to just have someone to talk to. There is no formality to these chats, but are meant as a way to talk about goals, issues, and concerns with someone.
Resources
Where useful, we supply resources that are available for all employees to access freely and without needing to make their needs visible to all unless they require that.
Staff Wellbeing Coordinator
The People Circle have a role for a "Staff Wellbeing Coordinator", this role is intended to give priority to needs as they arise. So if an individual raises a wellbeing need to the circle (or the coordinator) they can take it on and help investigate and assist.
As mentioned before though, this individual is NOT a trained Psychologist, so whilst they can talk, listen, and signpost, they cannot help specifically.
Steps if you need assistance
As part of our approach, below are the first steps to helping us all to get any help we might need for ourselves, colleagues, friends, family, and anyone we might see.
- First consider where you/they are on the handy traffic light system as it may be best to seek professional help alongside what we can also do
- The NHS has produced some very handy NHS self-help leaflets which are recommended to look at
- There are places on (and off) line you can go which are considered trained and trustworthy
- NHS
- Mind
- IAPT
IAPT (UK only)
Stands for “Improving Access to Psychological Therapies” and is an NHS programme that we should utilise where possible.
NHS England » Adult Improving Access to Psychological Therapies programme
NHS Tiers of mental health support
IAPT is well financed “gold standard therapy”, it is what we should use, paid services are not necessarily better.
These are the general tiers that are involved within the NHS to help understand the levels of help required:
- self help
- IAPT group therapy, telephone therapy, up to 6 sessions
- IAPT face-to-face, video up to 12 sessions
- AMHT serious
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