Posted on Tue 18 Feb 2014 at 17:21 by
Rebecca Grimes
One of the main aims I set myself when I started this job was that I wanted our Students’ Union to pledge to Time to Change Wales.
Before I get into the long and mushy bit – I would like to just say that the pledge event is tomorrow (19th February) at 10.30am in JCs (Coffee Side) and it would be lovely to see you there!
Anyway.
Time to Change Wales is the first national campaign to end the stigma and discrimination faced by people with mental health problems. By pledging to Time to Change Wales, the SU are making a public declaration that they want to step up in the fight against mental health stigma and discrimination. Mental health is tricky enough to deal with without the added worry and concern about how people may perceive you. The stigma and discrimination a person may face can be as crippling as the illness itself. I saw a really great cartoon about what would happen if we treated physical illness like we do mental illness – it just shows that we need a little bit of patience and consideration. It’s not exactly nice not feeling 100%.
As part of the pledge, we were required to make an action plan which we would have to work towards to complete over the next coming months. (If you want to see the action plan I would be more than happy to share it with you, but I doubt you’d be too interested in quite a lengthy and wordy spreadsheet.) One of the most exciting things to come out of this is that we’ll be writing a mental health policy which covers the staff and student staff of our organisation. Believe it or not, Students’ Unions can be an incredibly stressful environment to work in, and the incredibly hardworking full-time and part-time staff deserve to have a mental health policy put in place so they know what help they can access through us, as employers. As well as this, our action plan puts mental health campaigns on top priority so campaigns such as Invisible Illnesses Week, led by the wonderfully amazing Tori-Ilana Evans, SUSU Disability Officer, will not be forgotten, and can continue to grow and strengthen year-on-year.
An added excitement factor to our pledge event is that it’s a joint pledge with Swansea University. The Vice-Chancellor will be there with bells on showing that not only do the Students’ Union take mental health seriously, but the university do too. Sian Challenger, the Manager of Wellbeing, the on-campus counselling service, has been completely incredible in making this happen and I hugely appreciate everything that she’s done, as well as Sarah Huws-Davies (Director of Student Services) and Andrea Mateo (Head of Student Support Services).
Our union does some incredible things in respect to mental health, but we can always be better. One in four people suffer from a mental health illness every year, but the problem of stigma and discrimination doesn't lie with them - the problem belongs to the 75% who aren't suffering. It is quite literally, time to change. This pledge is one of the first steps to really stamping out stigma, and I could not be more excited about it.