History of The Mental Health Toolkit
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.
Speak to us today