Preventing Mental Illness

 

Improving the population’s mental health and wellbeing and preventing mental illness and suicide is a key priority for public health. Like much public health, this priority requires action across many sectors, including those working across early years, education, health and social care, business, welfare and housing, criminal justice, neighbourhoods and communities.  
 

Training staff with the knowledge and skills to improve mental health and wellbeing and prevent mental illness and suicide is a specific recommendation within the NHS Five Year Forward View for Mental Health (1) and Public Health England’s (PHE) public mental health leadership and workforce development framework (2). PHE’s review of the public health workforce (3) identified resilient communities and better public mental health as key drivers affecting the public health workforce in the future.

 

GOV UK REPORT
Mental Health Promotion and Prevention Training Programmes

Applying the practice of mindfulness in schools to improve staff and student wellbeing and resilience is one of the emerging practice examples of mental health promotion in this PHE Report.

 

This report supports those who wish to commission or deliver such training as part of building a public health system capable of meeting the growing mental health challenge.

28 February 2018
Mental Health Services: Children and Young People

 

Mental Health Support Teams will be trained to deliver evidence-based interventions for children and young people with mild/moderate needs. The teams will work collaboratively with senior designated leads in schools and colleges and other professionals such as educational psychologists, school nurses, counsellors and social workers to assess children and refer them on for further treatment if necessary. Over the course of the consultation period we are seeking views on the exact role of the teams.

The major research for Mindfulness and Resilience in Adolescence can be found at the £6.4 million MYRIAD research programme from the Wellcome Trust that started in January 2015. It is being carried out by teams at the University of Oxford, UCL and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, in collaboration with King’s College London and the University of Exeter.