Beth Robotham of CMHA on why MHFAs are not a silver bullet but should be part of a wider strategy

Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) England is making a great impact in people’s knowledge and confidence to talk about mental health – in the last 12 years in England this social enterprise has worked with 20,000 businesses of all sizes and has trained nearly 500,000 people – including me. It made such an impression on me personally that I went on to train as an MHFA England Instructor and then joined the Board as a non-executive director.

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In my role as deputy chair of City Mental Health Alliance, some of the important lessons in workplace mental health that businesses share are:

Awareness sessions only get you so far.
Available services need to be accessed sooner by employees and their families.

Managers are often a pivotal point of contact, although they can be overloaded and sometimes are worried they’ll say the wrong thing. Manager training and creating a community within workplaces who can confidently discuss mental health conditions, know their boundaries and support people to access the right services can also really help.

MHFA training is sometimes criticised for not being the ‘silver bullet’ of workplace mental health and wellbeing support. For me, that perspective perfectly outlines why evolution of workplace support has been slow, because it suggests there is one perfect solution (spoiler alert: there isn’t). This slows down innovation and creates hesitation in trying new things. No single programme can address all areas of workplace mental health support and every programme needs to have strong governance and oversight.

The reason I take the time to train adult Mental Health First Aiders (in businesses, NHS and the government) is because you see a shift in people’s understanding of how to take better care of themselves and how to support others with a set of skills we don’t receive training for in most environments: listening. The complexity of mental health, our lack of literacy and fear of getting it wrong is stifling. After training, people can see their role and have clarity that they can have an impact by connecting people to services and giving them space to talk. A Mental Health First Aider recently told me that actually they use the non-judgemental listening and communications skills taught on the course in lots of conversations at work, not just those centred on wellbeing.

MHFA England plan to focus more on workplaces in the next few years and are already delivering refresher courses and resources to help employers increase MHFAiders implementation and ongoing management. Their focus on new products and adding to the research base will help evolve the programme to continue to have the same impact as workplace needs develop and mature.

Ultimately business solutions need to be tailored to their own needs and culture. We need to shift our thinking to multi-faceted and whole system approaches that have collaborative and complementary programmes, culture and strategy so that they work in harmony and adjust to the changing organisational needs.

The author is Beth Robotham, executive director at Goldman Sachs International in EMEA and deputy-chair of City Mental Health Alliance.