Campaigning for mental health

HAFAL is a Welsh charity led by its members – people directly affected by mental illness.

Often, when we think about recovery from a mental illness, we might assume that the focus should be on medication or other therapies which deal with symptoms. These can be vitally important, especially for those with serious mental illness.

But we have found that mental health is built on much broader foundations.

For any one individual the biggest step to recovery may be finding a great place to live, getting a job or meeting new friends.

Usually there are a set of different things which contribute to someone’s recovery. One of those key things is physical health. People with a serious mental illness such have a life expectancy between 15 to 20 years lower than the general population.

For many, the side-effects of medication can have a significant impact on physical health: diabetes is highly prevalent in adults treated with antipsychotic drugs, and weight gain is also a major side-effect.

Additionally, smoking rates are significantly higher in this group and smoking is known to be a major contributory factor in premature mortality.

The same health inequalities apply to carers. Joint research published by Carers UK and other carers’ charities has found that more than 80% of carers have seen a negative impact on their physical health.

One of our goals as a charity is to tackle these physical health inequalities.

People with a serious mental illness are dying earlier not so much because of suicide or violence but from heart attacks, strokes and cancer.

This needs urgent attention, and we must try to find ways to improve health and social care outcomes experienced by our clients.

Recent Welsh legislation and policy aims to tackle the inequalities.

For Hafal, it’s about raising expectations among our clients and carers.

For many years we have run a national “Let’s Get Physical!” campaign to highlight the importance of physical health in recovery.

A key part of this campaign has been our “Let’s Get Physical!” event in Swansea where hundreds of service users and carers get together to compete in a number of events and activities, and to get some key advice and information on physical health.

Our latest event took place in Swansea earlier this month, and I’m delighted to report that for the first time we also ran a similar event in north Wales in partnership with CAIS, where we were joined by the Welsh Guards Rugby Team, and Game of Thrones and Star Wars actor Spencer Wilding.

By staging these events we hope to demonstrate that physical and mental health are not separate, unconnected aspects of a person’s life. And we want to show that getting healthy can be achieved by taking simple steps towards longer-term goals.

In the coming years we will campaign to ensure that everyone with a serious mental illness receives regular physical health checks within primary care services.

We hope that the results will speak for themselves. As one of our members told me: “Now that I’m physically healthy, my mental health is simply much better.”