Why we talked about mental health for 12 hours

CEO of Citizens Advice Wokingham, Jake Morrison, talks about our marathon livestream

Published in

We are Citizens Advice

7 min readAug 4, 2020

I’ve experienced issues with my mental health for as long as I can remember. It’s affected my career, relationships and daily life. I started to talk about my mental health openly following a post I put up on LinkedIn, talking about my challenges and the realities of living with my mental health. The pandemic has led to further intense feeling of ups and downs. Many people reached out to me, particularly in our service, to share similar experiences. I realised there was a passion to do something — so that is what we did!

On Tuesday 28 July we held a 12 hour livestream on mental health, from 9am right through to 9pm.

20 colleagues from across the Citizens Advice national and local network in England and Wales joined us throughout the day to share their experiences and talk frankly about mental health.

Throughout the day we had panels on areas such as peer support, mindfulness, mental health and leaders, how to start a conversation on mental health and more.

So, what happened?

We started the morning with coffee

We decided that the best way to start the day was with a coffee morning and a casual chat about mental health. As we intended, we got straight into the topics. It was a great way to start the conversation — even pets enjoyed it!

Minky (not my cat) enjoying the live stream!

Over the course of the day, we tackled a lot of difficult subjects…

Colleagues shared their personal experiences on issues including eating disorders, anxiety, depression, bipolar along with other mental health and long-term health conditions.

I also talked about my experience of suicidal thoughts and how it’s something I just have to live with. I’m currently still navigating the health system for further diagnosis. Of particular note to me personally was the mental health and leaders session, where Sue and Charlotte also discussed the perceptions and challenges we face to keep things afloat!

We broadcast live on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube plus our internal Workplace to over 2,000 people throughout the day.

We spoke about how we could help our clients…

Colleagues also talked about services they deliver to support clients with mental health problems in their local area. Citizens Advice Rushmoor talked about a service they’ve been running for over 20 years, providing casework level support to those in secondary care.

Some local Citizens Advice also shared news around delivering Adult Mental Health First Aid training to their staff and volunteers to better identify and respond to those experiencing mental health issues.

At Citizens Advice Wokingham, we’re seeing more people in recent weeks than at anytime throughout the pandemic presenting with mental health issues.

We made some plans for the future

We really liked the format, it worked well and was engaging but 12 hours was tiring! We agreed that we would like some form of monthly livestream, where we have open and honest dialogue with our colleagues across the network on a variety of themes throughout the year.

A couple of us also agreed to trial some mental health and wellbeing check-ins at our local charities, so that we could share this as best-practice in the future with our other offices.

The day ended on a quiz and a wrap-up

Sarah and Stu did a great job with an engaging quiz to bring us towards the end of the day, and then joined us for a wrap-up session discussing what next steps we’d like to see, and engaging with participants via the comments section.

What some of our panelists have to say about the day

Some key points of what we discussed on the day from Sue Campbell:

Supporting and promoting good mental health is crucial, including, but not limited to, those with a diagnosed mental health condition. Over the last few months, across the globe, many people will have experienced some degree of psychological distress due to COVID-19. So this conversation is even more important than ever, and applies to everyone — especially those in organisations like ours which are responding directly to the crisis.
The power of connection — within our individual organisations and across the network. Communication came up a lot, and ways of improving communication through IT and so on, but the core of this was about connection. We can support really good wellbeing across the whole network by continuing to explore more and better ways to connect with each other, promoting the importance of it, and making time for that connection
The importance of kindness, to ourselves and to reach others. This is also key to good mental health, and underlies lots of the ways in which we can maintain good wellbeing. This is especially true for CEOs (but also applies to other roles too)

“In terms of reflection on the day, I think it was so needed — a dedicated platform for sharing insights and experience on mental health in the workplace that will be so relevant for many, not just within the Citizens Advice network. It was easier than I thought it might be, the conversations flowed really well and I thought we hit a good balance of persona experience and thoughts about the wider picture, and it was really good to connect with people from different parts of the network and different roles within it to get an all round picture of how mental health issues is such a big part of what we do”
Rosi Avis
“Mental health is a key topic at the moment, and it impacts so many of our clients — we can play a pivotal role in reducing some of the contributors to poor mental health by helping alleviate things like debt, poor housing, employment issues and relationship problems, so I feel strongly that as an organisation we need to have support for mental health embedded in our operations and raising its profile by the event yesterday is key to this.”
Gill Pipkin

My thoughts on the day

We really liked the format, it worked well and was engaging. Whilst 12 hours was tiring! We agreed that we would like some form of monthly livestream, where we have open and honest dialogue with our colleagues across the network on a variety of themes throughout the year.

A couple of us also agreed to trial some mental health and wellbeing check-ins at our local charities, so that we could share this as best-practice in the future with our other offices.

As a Citizens Advice service we passionately value supporting people. Equality and diversity are important principles to guide our work.

I am really proud that as a service, we were comfortably and confidently able to pull-off a 12 hour livestream on a delicate subject. The feedback has been fantastic.

The coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on our communities, and continues to affect our lives. Many of us are facing lots of ups and downs throughout, with lots of factors impacting our mental health and wellbeing.

That is why it felt timely to hold a livestream, not just for an hour, but for 12 hours to capture people’s attention, allowing people to dip-in and dip-out whenever they feel like. Our only objective was to put this high on the agenda.

The result is many people being able to relate to their colleagues, with comments saying:

“This has brought a real sense of being together in a way I haven’t seen before across the service.”
“I’ve dipped in and out through the day — hats off to all contributors and discussion points throughout. Well done. Proud to be a part of such an open & collaborative service.”

We care, we care about you, we care about your mental health, and we care about helping you move forward with your problems. I hope that this livestream and the work of our wonderful colleagues across the service inspires you to move forward on mental health.

We did not have all the answers but we made time for the conversation, to be open and transparent, to promote the importance of good wellbeing and supporting mental health across all roles in the service. Simply feeling ‘not alone’ can help people to come to terms with their mental health issues and feel more apart of the organisation in which they work.

By being open, by facing the challenges, and committing to move forward, we will be a much more rich, dynamic, supportive and engaging service.