Integrate mental health

This piece looks at how to embed mental health into all of your policies, procedures and activities so it is integrated into everything you do. This prevents mental health from being a one-off project, and enables it to be person-centred and a fundamental part of your culture.

Create a Mental Health Policy

A mental health policy sets out how everyone involved with your organisation will be supported with their mental health. It helps to ensure that anyone, including staff, volunteers, your membership, clubs, coaches, participants and spectators, are invested in working towards a shared outcome.

Watch Time to Change's Masterclass on Mental Health Policy

Use our template mental health policy to help create your own policy.

Template mental health policy

Invite input from people with lived experience to provide input into your policy without assuming what is needed - see "Involve people meaningfully".

Ensure mental health is included in key policies and procedures

It is important mental health is included in key policies across your organisation to ensure everyone is supported with their mental health.

Click below to view the key organisational policies to include mental health.

View policies

If you have a minimum of 20 employees, Mind’s Workplace Wellbeing Index is a really useful way to benchmark yourselves for good policy and practice.

Boosting wellbeing through cycling

Cycling for Recovery is a collaborative programme between Devon NHS Community Forensic team, Active Devon and Ride On that uses cycling to help improve mental health.

The programme was co-designed by people with lived experience who wanted to get involved in cycling to boost mental and physical health.

Consider mental health provision and support across all policies

For mental health to be truly embedded across an organisation, it is important you consider how mental health is integral in all your policies.

When you review any of your policies, we suggest carrying out a mental health impact assessment (MHIA) which can be as straightforward as considering a few questions at each review.

View our mental health impact assessment template

Include mental health support in all activities

Examples of this include:

When holding an event, have adjustments been considered to support people with their mental health? For example, providing a quiet space/room where people can go if they need to take time away from the event.

For sessions to be welcoming to people with mental health problems, they need to be inclusive and adjustments made. Take a look at Making physical activities inclusive to people experiencing mental health problems for guidance on how to adapt sessions.

As part of the tendering process when working with suppliers, ask if they provide mental health support to their staff and what this looks like.

Mind's Get Set to Go programme was developed to help people with mental health problems to benefit from being physically active. An evaluation of this programme produced a number of recommendations for organisations wanting to support people with mental health problems to become more active and overcome any barriers they may experience. Contact sport@mind.org.uk to find out how this may work for your organisation.

Watch Duke McKenzie talk about how coaches can create an inclusive environment for people with mental health problems

Click here for the British Sign Language version.

How do you integrate mental health into your organisation?
_{(tick all that apply)}

Our organisation has a mental health policy.
We obtained input from people with lived experience to help write our mental health policy.
We ensure that mental health is included in some of our key policies and procedures.
We ensure that mental health is included in all of our key policies and procedures.
Our organisation considers mental health provision and support when reviewing all of our policies and procedures.
We include mental health support in the physical activity sessions we provide.

Make a commitment

Track your journey

Involve people meaningfully

Integrate mental health

Be person- centred

Connect & collaborate

Improve knowledge & confidence

Champion mental health

Spot, support & signpost