It is estimated in areas of the UK, 17% of the adult population have mental health problems with only 30% of those affected individuals seeking professional help. (McManus, S et.al. 2014) There is a tendency to delay help seeking and problems tend to exacerbate over time. While barriers to help seeking exist, ‘perceived need’ and accessibility has been found to be key barriers to help-seeking. (Brown, J.S.L et. Al, 2022)

ASCERT, the South Eastern and Western Health and Social Care Trusts have been working to bring support to people at a much earlier stage. We have created 3 free on- line self-help resources with workbooks that can be downloaded and visual clips that guides the viewer through the workbooks at their own pace.

• Using Self Compassion to Improve Wellbeing and Support Growth Self Compassion | ASCERT
• Bend Don’t Break: Low intensity CBT based self-help to support resilience

https://www.ascert.biz/bend-dont-break/

• Building our Children’s Developing Brain for parents to help build their children’s emotional regulation. https://view.pagetiger.com/selfcareforfamilies

Engaging workshops: From September 2023 until March 2024, 9 psychoeducational workshops, have been organised via zoom to engage participants in the work, and build motivation to make use of the on-line interventions. This work is early intervention and not aimed people with more serious embedded challenges.

Evaluation: Each of the psychoeducational workshops will have an evaluation and each of the on-line interventions has an evaluation component on its web platform, all be it qualitative, to gauge impact.

You Tube Clips to support well-being: Additional You Tube Clips to support conversations on well-being have been developed through ASCERT and the South Eastern H&SCT with written resources the viewer can download from the description on the You Tube site.

• How stress and trauma affect our nervous system Stress and trauma and our nervous system: How it affects us and ideas for healing. – YouTube
• ideas for healing and self-Self-Care Now When We Need It Most – YouTube
• Dealing with worry. Dealing with worry by Ed Sipler – YouTube
• What supports long term change: Keeping change going – YouTube

References

Brown, J.S.L et. al. How Can We Actually Change Help-Seeking Behaviour for Mental Health Problems among the General Public? Development of the ‘PLACES’ Model. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19, 2831.

McManus, S.; Bebbington, P.E.; Jenkins, R.; Brugha, T. Mental Health and Wellbeing in England: Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2014; NHS Digital: Leeds, UK, 2016.

Calendar of events

The pyscho-educational sessions below are aimed at applying the content for one’s personal use and development. They are open to any adult including practitioners.

Training for practitioners to use this type of low intensity work as “guided self-help” will have additional training events in the winter of 2024.

It would help practitioners who want to use the resources in their work to have a greater understanding of the content by personal application by attending these pyscho-educational sessions though not mandatory.

Sign up for any of the sessions is through Event Brite coordinated by the Western Trust. See the training brochure from the Western Trust  Health Improvement, Equality and Involvement Training Brochure | Western Health & Social Care Trust (hscni.net)

What is coming next.

A 4^th on-line intervention is under construction on using the Polyvagal Theory to Support Well-Being and will be ready to pilot in November 2023 through Autism NI and foster carers in the South Eastern Trust.

The self-help booklet is currently on the South Eastern Trust’s website.

Nervous-System-Brochure-Final.pdf (hscni.net)