MHAW Keeping People Connected Campaign

The theme of Mental Health Awareness Week 2022 was loneliness. To support the week, Community Living Well ran its own campaign, ‘Keeping People Connected’.

The aim was to highlight all of the incredible organisations in our local community who work to keep people connected and reduce loneliness.

IAPT and Community Living Well recognise that the impact of loneliness and isolation on our health is a great as smoking or obesity and as an a wraparound, holistic service we were well positioned to host this campaign. IAPT is aware that at times the reason people do not connect with others is because they are experiencing low mood, anxiety or depression, IAPT and Community Living Well are here to support them through brief psychological therapies to start living the life they deserve.

We asked organisations to record a short video message highlighting activities or events they run that connect people, helps them to make friends and reduce loneliness. We created a guide to support organisations to make the videos and encouraged them to create clips in community languages as well as English. These included videos created by the IAPT team both in English and in their mother tongue languages, not only to be able to connect with those for whom English is their second language but also to reflect the diversity within our team.

We shared the video’s across a variety of platforms such as participating GP surgeries to ensure that we reached those who are impacted by the digital divide or are vulnerable and on our Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

The ‘Keeping People Connected’ campaign was a huge success with 18 videos received, 189 on-post engagements, and 1,705 total video views.

The online campaign has boosted uptake for the local organisations that participated. Mahbuba Parvin Sabur, Community Development Worker/Healthworks Enable Project, who works closely with the Bangladeshi community said: “My video has so many views on Twitter, people are calling to find out more about what I do and are signing up! I love helping people, I want to work more closely with IAPT to help more people.”

As part of Mental Health Awareness week we also worked in partnership with statutory and community organisations such as Lancaster West Residents Association, RBKC Libraries, Operation Cup of Tea and RBKC Leisure centres. We visited community anchors and held stalls, talks and workshops and had Large information displays in locations such as the Children’s Centre’s.