About this site and the author

This blog provides short bursts of information about events I’m interested in from a community management and communications perspective.

I am from a PR background and have worked at Brands2Life, Cow and Hill & Knowlton. After having worked as freelance consultant for a year, I have now started work at Burson Marsteller. Please note that this is my personal blog, so anything I say here is a reflection of my personal views and not in any way related to my work.

I have most recently been part of a group of volunteers working on a project called Mindapples,  which aims to start a conversation on the following topic:

“What’s your 5-a-day for mental health?”

Why? I truly believe a trend is emerging, in which people will increasingly become less apologetic about their differences. I think that it is partly to do with the effects of globalisation: as people move countries more, change jobs more, become exposed to a far wider pool of human experience than our ancestors; people shall become less inclined to subscribe to the normative influence of the hegemonic forces of yesterday. Forces that I believe have made people hide anything in themselves that is seen as ‘outside of the status quo’.

Having conversations about mental health is very much outside of the status quo. Despite endless campaigning, there is still a range of stigmas surround the topic. Despite endemic stress levels in the UK’s corporate communities, mental wellbeing is rarely discussed there, possibly because no one wants to be questioned about how fit they are for their job.  But the fact is there is no real ‘division’, in my opinion, between the mentally well and unwell. It’s more of a spectrum that you can find yourself at one end or the other, depending on what yo have been exposed to; and what safeguards you have in place to look after yourself. These safeguards can be anything from climbing, yoga and cycling with friends (my favourites) to getting time offline, sitting in silence and so on. It’s high time we started a conversation about the subject, not to ‘normalise the issue’, but to prevent the need for basic human truths (people get sick sometimes) to be ‘normalised’. We shouldn’t be afraid of people who we perceive to have ‘different’ life experiences to us. The quote below sums up the reason why:

“It’s those who lie outside ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.”

Malcolm Gladwell