Food for thought

What is the mental equivalent of physical health’s 5-a-day? Fellow Andy Gibson wants your views as he argues that mental illness is a natural part of life
 
We all have mental health, we just don’t normally notice it unless it goes wrong. Yet the way we talk about it makes it sound like something that only a few people are affected by, and that only a few experts can help us with. All too often the message seems to be that if we ever suffer from mental distress, it makes us ‘different’ or ‘out of control’.
 
But I’ve suffered from depression, anxiety and stress, and I’d still self-identify as sane. If you ask most people if they’ve ever suffered from mental illness, I think they’d say no. But if you ask them if they’ve ever felt like they couldn’t cope, or been really sad or angry and not really known why, then most of us could relate to feeling like that. Mental health is a natural part of life and something we should all feel free to discuss.
 
In fact, I think there are emotional roots behind a lot of ‘social problems’ such as crime, addiction, ‘anti-social’ behaviour, disengagement, even diet and physical health. The solutions to these won’t come from outside us: we have to start within ourselves. We ignore the personal dimension so much in politics, but imagine if we actually sat down and asked: “How do we design our society to give us everything we need to stay mentally healthy?” We’d quickly find lots of things that need to change about how we live, work, play, educate and govern. Earlier this year, I was talking to some friends at Social Innovation Camp about the 5-a-day campaign for physical health. It was such a simple concept that it was taken up by parents, supermarkets and the NHS. It has had a huge impact on our attitude towards our physical wellbeing.
 
When the Burger King opposite my flat closed down, I suddenly realized how a simple, memorable concept like that could make a real difference to our behaviour. So I started asking people: what’s the mental health equivalent of 5-a-day? If we can take care of our physical health by going to the gym or eating an apple, then what’s the equivalent for our minds?
 
People seemed to like the question, so I pitched it at the last RSA Networks Exchange and found other RSA Fellows who were excited by it (Tessy Britton, Ian Gilmour and others – thank you so much).
 
It felt like there was something in this idea that we all wanted to see grow. Since my day job is building websites to support grassroots solutions to social problems (www.schoolofeverything.com being the main one), the next logical step was to build a simple website, www.mindapples.org, ask everyone the question and help them share their answers with the world.
 
I want to find the five most popular activities that people do to keep themselves mentally healthy, an example being listening to music. I’ve had 250 responses already and the next step is to reach 1,000 – enough to be taken seriously in the national press – which should be possible without spending any money.
 
With some small investment to build a proper site and help with the press campaign, I think this could become the biggest mental health survey ever undertaken because this is a question everyone can answer. By keeping it simple, we hope to make mental health an issue that everyone can talk about without fear of judgment or stigma.
 
Get Involved
Share your 5-a-day today by taking the Mindapples test at www.mindapples.org. If you can help, please email Andy Gibson at andy@sociability.org.uk or contact the RSA Networks team at networks@rsa.org.uk