Mental health and social media

LNER has earned plaudits from across industry for successfully utilising its social media platforms to tackle stigma surrounding mental health.

Ben Griffin, from LNER’s social media team, has been singled out for much praise in particular, after consistently showing great empathy following incidents when a person has been struck by a train.

For example, a tweet he posted on March 2 attracted more than 2,000 retweets and 8,000 likes, for the way in which he humanised a heart-breaking and tragic situation.

He explains: “The language the railway uses around suicide often seems quite stilted and old-fashioned, and fatalities always used to come under the same wording as ‘the train is late because someone has been hit by a train’. It’s said in a clinical way so it’s the same as any other disruption like a points failure, and people therefore view it as such.

“We wanted to use Twitter’s informality to speak to people on their level and to update the language we use around fatalities, because it’s not a normal delay and someone has lost their life.

“It helps to reduce the negativity that surrounds delays because we’ll ask people who complain to have some perspective.

“We’ll say things like ‘while you’re delayed someone will be getting a really awful phone call because their loved one is not coming home’.”

Since the start of the partnership with CALM, LNER’s social media team has also been directing people to CALM in case they have felt affected by any particular incidents.