READ ME 📖

Hello 👋🏻 I’m Charlie Penwarden (@charlieslides on Twitter) and mental health consultant at Behaveo.com, curator of the Mental Health Weekly Review.

THE WHY

As a former mental health nurse who has, like a lot of my former colleagues and fellow practitioners around the world, had enough of the continual demise of society’s generally poor mental health management and the system’s antiquated, non-progressive, non-humanistic, approach to serving people afflicted by mental ill health.

Add to that the callous governmental and corporate colluded austerity measures and it’s a perfect storm that we’re living through at present.

A mental ill health pandemic.

I can’t let another year pass while reading deplorable statistic after deplorable statistic and evidence from all angles that too many lives are being harmed and lost from a system that evidently doesn’t work for the many.

A radical-but-realistic approach is greatly needed.

THE WHAT

N.B. This is possibly the most complex undertaking of a system redesign that pains my brain to think about considering how much nuance there is and how many service channels there are and how differently they work across regions.

We, of course, need to define ‘the system’ and draw some lines of responsibility in order to solutionise effectively.

This is a collaborative project to begin to create a new vision and process for PREVENTION x CARE x REHABILITATION that involves all the necessary parties involved in a person’s mental health journey including GP Doctor Surgeries, Paramedic Service, The Police, Charities, Community Services, Schools, Therapists, Health and Life Coaches etc.

It will need to be flexible and dynamic to meet the varying needs of all within the mental healthcare ‘spectrum’, backed by peer-reviewed research and evidence, and fundamentally driven by human needs.

THE HOW

This digital whiteboard has a set of connected cards in a mind map style that houses the research curated and to note down any other necessary links, excerpts, documentation, PDFs, videos etc. and will give us a holistic view of the situation but with the ability to dive deeper into certain aspects if necessary.

My plan is to form a diverse task force team of experts in multiple disciplines and of varying degrees of influence in certain areas to meet regularly to make progress.

TASK FORCE SPECIALISMS

The following individual roles will represent their specialism and be stewards of their proposed views and endeavour to disseminate communications amongst peers.

• Psychiatrist

• Mental Health Nurse

• Counsellor

• GP Doctor

• Charity Representative

• Systems Strategist

PANEL DISCUSSION GROUP

It’s important to gain a broad and wide-reaching view of the system and we will therefore need to create one of more panel discussion groups whom consist of…

• Persons with lived experience

• Mental health support workers

• Occupational therapists

• Health and life coaches

• Social workers

• Paramedics

• Police personell

THE VISION

The vision is not yet defined and nothing is off the table. I’m primarily interested in non-clinical and holistic approaches to this strategy that aren’t driven by excessive fear and overt realism from clinical experience.

This isn’t for me to define it’s for us all to define.

We’ll be looking at leveraging private and/or crowd-sourced funding investment to be able to test and iterate, moving and learning fast, to prove concepts and roll out to certain regions then land and expand.

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