Mental health

In Islington, mental health needs are high. Preventive services, for example, day services, peer support groups, and talking therapies, play a vital role in helping people at risk stay feeling well, so they don’t go on to experience serious mental illness. Over the last ten years, service users and the community groups that support them have repeatedly impressed upon us the value of these preventive services, particularly those delivered in community spaces where service users feel welcomed and safe. We have shared that message with commissioners and worked to protect these services when it felt like they were under threat. We have also worked to ensure that this kind of support is accessible to more people in the borough.

In 2015, the feedback that 50 young adults shared with us about the kind of support they needed from mental health services helped to shape how those services look today. The same year, our staff and volunteers visited mental health day services used by adults of all ages to listen to staff and service users who were anxious about upcoming service changes. The following year over 100 people who used day services shared their stories with us. We were able to use these stories to give commissioners a better understanding of the reasons why people valued certain aspects of the support and to make sure that service users’ views were properly represented as part of the recommissioning process.

In 2020, we published our report demonstrating that mental health support was less accessible to communities that didn’t have English as a first language. As a result, new culturally-sensitive services have been introduced including mother-tongue counselling and peer support. A mental health inequalities subgroup co-chaired by Healthwatch has been established to make existing commissioning processes more robustly inclusive. And, working with community partners, we have published a mental health inequalities toolkit to support commissioners to design services that are accessible to diverse communities.

Now it’s 2023, and there’s been another step-change in our work, with three members of Healthwatch staff based for most of the week at Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust (our local mental health trust). The posts are new but the ambition is the same - to improve community access to mental health support. Our staff are supporting the Trust to build relationships with under-served communities and the community organisations working with them. One thing we hope this will do is enable earlier intervention, reaching and supporting more people when they are in the earliest stages of poor mental health, so they have the best chance of getting well and staying that way.