10 Ways to Look After Your Mental Health at Christmas The festive season is a time of joy and spending time with loved ones, but it can also be one of the most stressful and lonely periods of the year. During the December rush - frantic present buying and New Year party preparations - followed by the sudden ‘lull’ of January, it is important to try and remember how
I work as part of the Touchstone Housing Team, and as such I tend to work with people who have a housing need as well as a mental health issue. I enjoy this because I feel it takes a holistic approach to helping people’s lives, on the understanding that without stability and security it is difficult to heal our minds, and that without our psychological needs being met it is
On an annual basis questionnaires are sent out to service users in order to ascertain their views and opinions about Touchstone and the service they have received. The feedback and views of service users play a key role in identifying best practice, areas for improvement and informing our approach to delivering quality outcomes and continuous improvement. This year our service users highlighted the following: Overall opinion of Touchstone – 94%
We can easily reach for a drink of alcohol to try and change the way that we feel, this is because alcohol can quickly affect the chemicals in our brain and body. We may feel like it is relaxing us at the time, but what we know from a wealth of research; is that alcohol can actually become an unhelpful way to cope. Alcohol can increase levels of stress,
Bullying does not just happen in school, nor is it always children who are the bullies or the victims of bullying. Bullying can and does happen everywhere. Anti-Bullying week is about raising awareness of what bullying is and works to help people stand up to the bully in their community, be that home, work or play. Every year the Anti-Bullying Alliance co-ordinates Anti Bullying week and at Touchstone, we have
Social Phobia and Drinking – Friends or Foes? Drinking can often seem like a quick and easy way to address problems of stress and nervousness. To mark November Alcohol Awareness Week, Touchstone’s IAPT team look at why this is and how it can actually make the problem worse. The IAPT service can help people to observe and understand their own behaviour and to replace unhealthy coping strategies, like drinking, with more
On Friday 13th November 2015 it was International Day of Kindness. One of our IAPT colleagues Sally P has written the following piece to highlight the widespread benefits of random acts of kindness: Although on those bad days it can feel like we live in a society where people are uncaring, there has been a recent increase of individuals using social media to share examples of kindness in our society.
The work of Touchstone's IAPT team has been featured in an article in Therapy Today discussing the services who are trying to meet the mental health needs of refugees arriving in this country. Below is a small extract from the article. Richard Garland is Manager of Touchstone IAPT in Leeds, one partner in the consortium of NHS and voluntary sector organisations providing the IAPT service across the city. He is
Simon on the Streets are a charity devoted to supporting people who are homeless and sleeping rough on the streets through intensive support programmes, street outreach work and weekly soup-runs. They reach out to vulnerable people who need help but may be excluded from or refuse other services for various reasons, and are then left unsupported. Every year they host an event called “Sleeping with Simon”, in which members from
My experience and challenges as a refugee are to be summarised as less challenging than the Asylum and post asylum era where I can say I saw everything from deprivation, financial challenges and homelessness. Getting the refugee status was a big sigh of relief because it unlocked doors which have been locked and kept me in a limbo to access any rights. The next challenge was to engage with the