It's time to celebrate another ground-breaking year in tackling the stigma of mental health problems. It’s been a busy year, and here are our 10 biggest highlights of the year:
- The landmark Mental Health (Discrimination) Bill received Royal Assent in June, putting an end to archaic laws that discriminated against people with mental health problems.
- Many more high profile people have spoken out about their mental health problems this year: cricketer Jonathan Trott announced his departure from the Ashes following stress-related illness, MP John Woodcock spoke out about his depression, Olympic hurdler Jack Green decided to take a break from sport to recover from depression and Katherine Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s daughter opened up about her experience of depression.
- There was a public outcry over the “mental patient” and “psycho ward” Halloween costumes that appeared in Tesco and Asda. In response thousands of people took to social media posting pictures of themselves doing everyday things to show the world their real-life ‘mental patient’ outfits. Both supermarkets removed the costumes from sale, showing how much of a voice and influence we can have together.
- BBC Three launched a major mental health season, with a range of programmes aimed at breaking down stigma. Time to Change worked closely with the channel commissioners, as well as several of the production companies involved, providing media guidance, and the programmes gave a hard-hitting insight into mental health.
- Time to Change hosted the first annual meeting of the global anti-stigma alliance in September, with representatives from programmes across the world. Representatives from the US anti-stigma campaign ‘Bring Change 2 Mind’ founded by Hollywood actress Glenn Close, also attended the event after collaborating with us earlier this year to re-make our ‘Schizo the Movie’ advert for an American audience. The ad features the actress with her sister and her nephew, both of whom have mental health problems.
- World Mental Health Day 2013 saw a buzz of activity, including a Parliamentary event at which over 35 MPs signed our pledge as employers to end stigma and discrimination. The Bank of England also signed the pledge which featured on page two of The Times.
- The City Mental Health Alliance was launched, bringing together several city-based organisations including Lloyds Bank, Morgan Stanley and Slaughter and May to the stigma attached to mental health, and to encourage best practice in the city of London.
- Our January 2013 campaign of TV and Radio adverts successfully reached over 43.5 million people. As a result, over 640,000 of them were prompted to start a conversation about mental health and 2.8 million said it made them think about asking someone 'how they were doing'. Our next campaign will be launching on January 2014.
- This summer we asked people to ‘wear their hearts on their sleeves’ and wear our #TimetoTalk tattoos to help spread the conversation about mental health. We had celebrities such as Frankie from the Saturdays, Ruby Wax, Matt Johnson and comedian Russell Kane sporting tattoos and tweeting their support for the campaign.
- Our blogs are a popular way for individuals and champions to tell their story of mental health problems and the stigma associated. Our three most popular blogs of 2013 were: It takes so much effort to hide my mental health problems by Liz, What it's like to live with schizoaffective disorder by Jonny Benjamin and Naomi Bentley talks about her experience of mental illness by Naomi Bentley.
Sue Baker, Director of Time to Change, said:
“2013 has been a significant year for anti-stigma work with more awareness and more high profile individuals speaking out about their experiences of mental health problems. We have seen the power we have when we join forces and speak out about stigmatising behaviour and this will continue. We are now working on plans for 2014 and we hope everyone will join us in our very first Time to Talk Day, which will take place on Thursday 6 February and we’re aiming for a million conversations.”