This Saturday, 10 October, is World Mental Health Day. Expect plenty of posts, plenty of green ribbons and plenty of people being told it’s OK not to be OK.
All of that matters. People need to know it’s fine to talk, and that help is there when they need it.
But let’s be honest. We’ve been doing awareness for years, and people are still struggling with stress, anxiety and burnout in huge numbers. In the teams we work with, nearly one in four people arrive with anxiety at clinical levels. So maybe it’s time we asked a harder question. What are we getting wrong?
I’ve spent over a decade training teams across the Channel Islands and the UK, and before that I served in the Royal Marines and UK Special Forces. Here’s what I see. We keep making the same mistakes when it comes to preventing poor mental health. And most of them come down to one thing. We wait for people to struggle, then we react.
The mistakes we keep making
1. We wait until people are struggling
We spend most of our money, time and energy on treatment, not prevention. We wait until someone is signed off, in tears in the car park, or quietly handing in their notice. Then we act.
By then, we’re not preventing anything. We’re picking up the pieces.
2. We think knowing is the same as doing
Most people know what good mental health looks like. They’ve read the articles and sat through the lunch and learns. They can tell you what stress does to the body.
But when pressure moments and change hit, they fall back on old habits. Not because they forgot. Because nobody ever trained them to do it differently. Knowing what to do and doing it when it matters are two completely different things.
3. We send everyone down the same road
When someone says they’re struggling, the default answer is to speak to a counsellor. Counsellors and therapists do vital work, and people who are unwell need that help quickly.
But not everyone needs a therapist. Most people don’t. Most people are dealing with the normal stuff of life: a tough boss, a relationship ending, money worries, a restructure, a parent getting older. They don’t need treating. They need to know how to move themselves forward.
When we send everyone down the same road, we lengthen the waiting lists for the people who need help most. And we quietly tell everyone else they can’t handle life on their own.
4. We ask people to bounce back
We’ve spent years telling people to bounce back. Through a pandemic, the cost of living, restructures and relentless change. People have tried. But bouncing back only gets you to where you were before. More on that below.
5. We never teach the skills
We teach children to read, to swim and to cross the road safely. Nobody teaches us how to handle our own thinking when it runs away with us. How to calm our body down before a difficult conversation. How to reframe a setback so it doesn’t flatten us for a week.
Most of us are left to work it out the hard way, if we work it out at all.
Bounce back or bounce forward?
Bouncing back means getting back to where you were. But if where you were is what got you here, why would you want to go back?
We define resilience as the ability to positively adapt. We call it bouncing forward: coming through a tough time with new skills, new habits, and often in a better place than before.
There are three types of resilience. You’re born with natural resilience. You build adaptive resilience the hard way, through adversity. And you learn restored resilience. Of the three, people find restored resilience the easiest to build, yet almost nobody is ever taught it.
Treating what’s wrong versus building what’s strong
This is where counselling and therapy and positive psychology take different routes. We need both.
Counsellors and therapists help people work through distress. People often look at what’s gone wrong and why, and work through it with a professional over time. For someone who is unwell, that’s exactly the right support.
Positive psychologists ask a different question. Not only “what’s wrong?” but “what helps people thrive?” They focus on strengths, on what’s already working, and on the practical skills people can use to manage their thinking, their emotions and their relationships. They look forward rather than back.
The problem is that we’ve made the first route the default for everyone, and we’ve hardly given anyone the second.
What we need to do instead
- Train people before they hit the wall. Prevention means giving people skills early and helping them practise until they use them without thinking.
- Teach skills, not just awareness. Simple, practical tools people can use straight away: spotting thinking traps, calming the stress response, reframing a setback, having the honest conversation they’ve been putting off.
- Keep therapy for the people who need it. When most people can move themselves forward, the people who need specialist support get it sooner.
- Train people to help each other. When people share the same skills and the same language, they can coach themselves and support those around them. We call that moving from self care to we care.
- Measure it. If you can’t see, hear or measure the change, you’re not building capability. You’re just passing on knowledge.
What happens when people get the skills
We’ve measured our programmes for over ten years, across more than 200 organisations, using validated clinical tools before and after training. These are our current averages:
What we measure
Before training
After training
People reporting low stress
26%
47%
People with clinical levels of anxiety
23%
11%
44%
18%
People with low wellbeing
57%
15%
On top of that, people gain an average of 112 hours of productive time a year, and organisations get back around £12 for every £1 they invest.
These people weren’t sent to therapy. They were trained in how to look after their own mental health, and they used it.
A final thought
This World Mental Health Day, by all means start the conversation. But let’s not stop there.
When we raise awareness, we tell people it’s OK to struggle. When we train them, we give them a way through it. Most people don’t need fixing. They need the skills to move themselves forward, and somebody to teach them.
We’ve never had a knowledge problem. We’ve had a doing problem.
If you’re struggling right now, please talk to someone. Your GP is a good place to start, and Samaritans are there day or night, free, on 116 123.
