Celebrating Connectedness on World Mental Health Day

On the 9th of October, our Slough Mental Health Services came together to celebrate World Mental Health Day in a completely different way… Virtually! While we would normally hold a special event in the Curve, unfortunately this was not possible due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, we were still determined to mark the occasion together so we decided to celebrate digitally instead. All our services and community partners showed admirable creativity and fortitude in creating a special programme of celebration for the day, themed very appropriately around the concept of “connectedness”.

We had over 50 contributors on the day, from services including EMBRACE, Wellbeing & Coaching, Hope College, our Carers services, and many more. A variety of community partners shared in the fun too, with our friends at OneSlough and the Samaritans both presenting.

As the focus of the day was “connectedness”, we were lucky enough to have several very engaging speakers including Natasha Berthollier, our senior lead for co-production and recovery; Seb Byrne, our head of adult mental health services; Cllr Natasa Pantelic, the Slough Borough Council (SBC) Cabinet member for health and wellbeing; Alan Sinclair, the SBC director of adults and communities; and Susanna Yeoman, our divisional director for Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. We had a diverse range of speakers and thoughts, but uniting them all was that common theme around the importance of staying connected in an isolated world.

There were many more special guests and great speakers, so we have gathered the keynote speeches together on our YouTube channel. Please click here to view them. We know that some friends and colleagues were unable to make it on the day so, in the spirit of connectedness, we wanted to make sure that everyone can still celebrate with us even if they couldn’t attend at the time!

World Mental Health Day occurs every year on October the 10th. We hope you will be able to join us to celebrate next year – and we look forward to staying connected with you in the meantime.