What is Time to Change?

Vanessa Pinfold: Time to Change is a programme – it’s actually 35 programmes that have come together – to try and address over five years a key element of stigma and discrimination...which is about raising awareness, tackling peoples attitudes, and starting to make some changes around behaviours and the things that people do to stigmatise, either consciously or unconsciously, because not everybody knows that they are doing it, and also some specific actions around discrimination.

If you are a member of the public, the thing that’s probably going to be most visible to you is the social marketing campaign: the TV adverts, the billboard adverts, the beer mats in pubs, posters that go up, social networking stuff that’s happening online through Facebook, through You Tube – there are a number of videos that have been made that have reached thousand upon thousands of people.

Claire Henderson: Time to Change is a £20 million programme with lots of different bits to it. It’s funded mostly by Big Lottery, but also by a big chunk from Comic Relief, and the people delivering all the interventions are Mind and Rethink. 

There’s a whole aspect to Time to Change, which is to do more with legal aspects. And there are two components to this – one is to try and test cases of discrimination, which they will then follow, they hope, all the way through to the European Court. The importance of this is that a lot of the time, cases about discrimination are settled out of court, and that doesn’t really help clarify the law as far as discrimination regarding mental health is concerned. So there isn’t much in terms of test cases and precedents for people to go on – so they hope to find a case and follow that over the years, because these things take a long time to come to fruition.

And the other aspect of the legal work is that they’ve developed resources online – information both for employers about good practice in terms of employing people with mental health problems, and at the same time, information for employees – and that’s all on their website.

Vanessa Pinfold: The other key component of Time to Change is Get Moving, which is an active campaign, which is an annual thing about bringing people together to do something for mental health.

It’s very important to spread the word and to do activities in the local community. What research has shown is that contact is really, really important in challenging stigma. Therefore the whole Time to Change programme is about bringing people with mental health problems and carers, family members, people affected by mental health, together with members of the public to have a dialogue, to have communication, to try and open up what this thing called mental health really is.

It’s really important to emphasise that Time to Change is about the whole spectrum of mental health – emphasising that we all have it, we all have mental health, and we can all have mental health problems, and it’s really important that people can start talking about it in an open way, so that if you do experience difficulties, you feel able to go and seek help. Because we know that stigma is a really key barrier to people seeking help, which again hinders people’s recovery, can lead to more complicated course of events and actually mean it can take longer to recover.

Claire Henderson: Over the four years, what we’ve said is we want to see a 5 per cent reduction in discrimination – a 5 per cent reduction in negative attitudes. And then there are target numbers in terms of the people involved, the service users involved with Time to Change, to be empowered by it – and then the target numbers in terms of the number of people doing more physical activity as a result.

We have a panel each year of service users – we ask different people each year about their experiences of discrimination in a wide variety of areas of life over the last 12 months. So each year we can compare with the previous 12 months over the course of Time to Change, and see whether we see a fall in the overall level in terms of discrimination.

Vanessa Pinfold: What’s really important about Time to Change is that it’s trying to shake things up and really try and raise awareness around these issues but it’s not trying to eclipse everything else that’s happening, it’s not saying it’s only this thing that’s around stigma and discrimination.

Individual people, individual service users, individual carers, individual practitioners can do a lot to address stigma and discrimination themselves in their own practice, and also locally in the way in which they talk to people. It’s very, very challenging to sometimes open up about your problems, but that is one of the ways – when it’s done in the right way and when people feel comfortable about it – of challenging stigma.

• Print out information
  on this page
• Back to previous page