Togetherness – Our World Mental Health Day Celebration in 2021

For our Enabling Town Slough celebration of World Mental Health Day this year on Friday the 8th of October, we asked our services to tell us what Togetherness means to them. The idea was to come together, reflect on the challenging times of the last year, and celebrate how we’ve been able to overcome them between us. Meeting virtually for the second year in a row, we had exciting co-produced contributions from many of our services including Wellbeing and Coaching, BRAVE, and our newer services like the Mental Health Integrated Community Service (MHICS) and the Managing Emotions Programme (MEP). Both of these exciting new ventures are focused on helping people who get support from their GPs rather than services like the Community Mental Health Team – as you can see, we truly focused on uniting all our services to celebrate Togetherness!

With additional contributions from our Carers services, the EMBRACE community, and guest speakers including Natasa Pantelic and Susanna Yeoman amongst others, we spent the afternoon enjoying a range of engaging presentations including testimony from BRAVE Ambassadors, a special poem on Togetherness from the MEP Peer Trainer, and a group conversation from the EMBRACE community on how to stay connected with friends when feeling unwell. The image above shows you just a small glimpse of the vibrant contributions we were lucky enough to see.

Over 65 friends and colleagues were present on the day – however, including contributors and community members who couldn’t attend on the day, we had around 90 different people taking part in various ways. Huge thanks to everyone who joined in!

World Mental Health Day occurs every year on October the 10th. If you would like to talk to someone about your mental health, please remember that you can get in touch with our Community Mental Health Team on 01753 690950. Across the UK, you can call the Samaritans on 116 123, or visit United For Global Mental Health to find support in other countries. We hope you’ll join us when we celebrate next year!