Time to Talk: About Mental Health at Ministry of Defence

Thursday 3 February is Time to Talk Day. Here at the MOD, we want to highlight the importance of talking to others and encouraging others to engage in conversations about mental health. 

Within our lifetime, many of us will struggle with or suffer from mental ill-health. However, our organisation believes that it is important that everyone should feel comfortable to talk about their own mental health without judgement. We need to end the stigma around these conversations, taking steps towards ending mental health discrimination.

There are many steps we like to ensure are being taken in the MOD:

• Like encouraging line managers to have conversations about mental health with their people. This could be through sharing their own experiences and asking others how they are and if they want to talk.
• Asking others if they are facing challenges and if there is anything that can be done to make things better.
• Managers getting to know their teams: Identifying stress behaviours - how do team members behave when they are stressed or anxious, and identifying what can be done to help? 
• Work some time into your regular team meetings to talk about something that is not focused on work.

In addition to the wealth of support and services available to our people, to help our people in this area the Department is running Stress, Anxiety and Burnout webinars in conjunction with the Civil Service Charity.