Category: Uncategorized
We were so proud to share our programme of mental health courses, and our approach to mental health at the University of Suffolk last week.
Hosted on 19th May to mark Mental Health Awareness Week 2023, our Spring Business Breakfast encouraged local, national, and even international companies to start conversations around supporting wellbeing in their workplaces.
We were delighted to be joined by representatives from a diverse range of organisations and industries, including:
- Shipping and Logistics (Bleckmann, VARTAN, Uniserve)
- Energy and Utilities (EDF, Pitkin & Ruddock Ltd)
- Construction (Barnes Construction)
- Legal (Smith & Co Solicitors, Bates Wells & Braithwaite Solicitors)
- HR and Recruitment (polkadotfrog, Lighthouse Personnel Ltd)
- Education (IKON Training, University of Suffolk)
- Public Sector (Suffolk Fire & Rescue Service)
- Design and Marketing (Hudson Group, GLO – Generate Leads Online)
The networking event included introducing the Emotional Needs & Resources approach to a fresh audience, sparking meaningful conversations and ideas for attendees to take back to their teams.
To round it all off, we enjoyed a debrief and a delicious new smoothie – the ‘Berry BrainWave’ – over at Paddy & Scott’s café on Ipswich’s beautiful waterfront.
Josh Vartan from Vartan, Steve Grimley from Uniserve and John Parnell from GLO, at Paddy & Scott’s
Want to join our next Business Breakfast?
We’ll be hosting another workplace wellbeing networking event in the autumn.
If you’d like to find out more, please get in touch with our team.
We are more than just an awareness week
The Mental Health Toolkit’s suite of workplace wellbeing training courses will help your business to go beyond Mental Health Awareness Week, so you can continue to support wellbeing in your team.
Explore the toolkit to find out more, and to book the right course for your organisation.
We’re pleased to share that one of The Mental Health Toolkit’s workshops won at the East Suffolk Awards 2023, at a ceremony that took place at Snape Maltings on Tuesday 28 February.
Our parent organisation, Suffolk Mind, won the Health and Wellbeing Award for our half-day session, The Mental Health Toolkit: The Essentials.
Jon Neal (pictured left), CEO of Suffolk Mind, said: “We are absolutely thrilled to have won this award.
“We are very proud of The Mental Health Toolkit and know it has the power to make a real difference. We are incredibly grateful to East Suffolk Council, and all the award sponsors, for their recognition and look forward to continuing on our quest to make Suffolk the best place in the world to talk about and take care of mental health.”
This half-day training session introduces you to the Emotional Needs & Resources approach, and equips you with the tools, skills and knowledge to look after your mental health, as well as that of those around you – as well as those around you.
Wendy Sheppard – our Corporate Relationships Manager (pictured right), said: “We had a fabulous evening. It was a pleasure to meet lots of new people who are also making a big difference in their local communities – well done to everyone that attended.”
Book this workshop
You can book yourself, your colleagues, or a whole team onto this workshop via The Essentials page.
Or, get in touch with the team to find the right tools for your organisation’s needs.
Interested in our other courses and workshops? Explore the Toolkit to find the right one for you.
Our beginnings
The history of The Mental Health Toolkit begins with Suffolk Mind.
Suffolk Mind have always provided mental health courses for the public. Then, in 2010, we started getting calls and emails from HR professionals, looking for the knowledge and skills to support employees with their mental health. This led to the development of our workplace wellbeing service. Over the last decade, it has grown into a team of highly skilled and in-demand trainers delivering our courses and workshops across the UK.
We knew from the very start that we wanted to go beyond the kind of training which just lists the symptoms associated with depression, anxiety, OCD and so on. People can easily find these on the internet. Most importantly, just knowing the symptoms won’t tell you how to prevent them from arising in the first place, nor will it help with recovery.
Instead, we started with the insight that unmet emotional needs cause stress, which pushes us down the mental health continuum. When company leaders and HR professionals attend our training, or hear us speak about emotional needs, they can see the difference immediately.
What is so different?
Firstly, if your workplace culture allows people to meet their emotional needs in healthy ways, they and the organisation will thrive.
Secondly, focusing on emotional needs and the skills to meet them, puts people in the driving seat. They are now empowered to identify and meet their needs, together with support from health professionals when required.
Thirdly, realising that we all have emotional needs which have to be met to stay healthy, normalises mental health without having to talk about stigma.
We all have emotional needs, and we are all on the mental health continuum. That knowledge can start to change a workplace culture.
It’s also heart-warming to hear back from the organisations we work with, who frequently tell us what a difference these ideas have made. Sometimes we hear from someone who has used what they learned to prevent a suicide. But sometimes it’s small changes, like improvements to employees’ quality of sleep.
These results all add up over-time. Over a decade on, and we’re in a world which faces new challenges to mental health. We’re glad we made the choice to pursue an approach to workplace wellbeing which makes meeting emotional needs the shared focus of the wider working community.
The future of The Mental Health Toolkit
We’re building upon our strong reputation for excellent workplace wellbeing training in Suffolk and further afield across the UK.
The Mental Health Toolkit is the next chapter in our mental health training. We’ve renamed some of our workshops and our training has a new, fresh look. What we’re not changing is the high-quality delivery and content of the training we have such a reputation for.
By visiting our website, and experiencing our training, you can have a huge impact on your mental wellbeing, and the wellbeing of those around you.