Lending a Hand to Head for Health

Andy Salmon, Customer Care Officer for the Wolverhampton Community Recovery Team. Below he talks about his experience of Head for Health, Wolves Community Trust’s Mental Health Project.

Users of our services have been accessing Head for Health for well over a year now and the impact and benefit it has had to their lives is massive. Accessing Head for Health has not only increased many of the participant’s mental wellbeing, but also their physical health and social skills.

Head for Health has given participants the encouragement to try and be more independent; many now find alternative ways to travel such as cycling and walking rather than using the transport provided. We have also seen a huge change in people’s diets too. They are now feeling fitter, stronger, and healthier and because of this they want to find other ways to help maintain that feeling.

It isn’t just the being fitter and stronger that helps our service users; Head for Health has really been a big part of their recovery. Many of our clients require medications to help sustain their mental health, but what Head for Health does is allows many to naturally feel better about themselves.

Prior to attending Head for Health, most of the participants where isolated. Some of the guys couldn’t handle being around large groups of people, even stepping one foot outside the house seemed a world away for them, due to their social situations and settings, as well as their mental health problems and the stigma associated to mental health.

However, since starting Head for Health the confidence and self esteem of the participants has grown massively, where some of the guys would shut themselves away and allow their lives to be consumed by their conditions or in many circumstances alcohol, they are now tending to leave the house and doing activities they never dreamed they would such as having a meal or going to the cinema.

All the participants now work as a team, they look after each other as a family or a close group of friends would. This has been one of the most obvious and heart warming changes we have seen in all of the participants.

Most of the time people with more moderate to severe mental health issues will tend to view people such as doctors as an “authority” and often feel unable to relax and open up around them, however, with the coaches they feel more relaxed and more comfortable to open up about their situations and that is due to the fact the staff take individual approaches to each participant, allowing them to feel welcome and safe.