About Us
Safely Held Spaces’ vision is of safe, compassionate, empowering support in local communities in the UK for people experiencing extreme mental and emotional distress and altered states, often called psychosis, and for the people supporting them.
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We aim to achieve this vision by exploring and reimagining the ways we think and talk about mental health, piloting and seeking to influence the development of safe spaces for holders and experiencers, and improving access to information on where to find safe spaces and other forms of support​​.
What we do
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People experiencing mental and emotional distress tell us they want to be met with compassion, that they want to feel empowered, and crucially, that they want to be given the opportunity to find meaning in their experiences.
With around a quarter of a trillion pounds spent on mental health services and research in the UK since the 1980s, and outcomes broadly flatlining and by some measures getting worse, Safely Held Spaces believes now is the time for us to come together to reimagine a better way of supporting one another.
That’s why a significant part of Safely Held Spaces’ work focuses on exploring the story we tell ourselves about why mental and emotional distress happens, and reimagining the kinds of support we as a society offer to both holders and experiencers.
Media and newsroom training
We provide media training to mental health professionals, experiencers and holders to empower them to speak out in the media about how we can reimagine our understanding of, and responses to mental and emotional distress. We're doing this so that a broader range of voices can be heard on television, radio and online.
If you are interested in our broadcast media or podcast training, click here to find out more.
We also offer a three-part training programme for journalists and news professionals to start thinking about people's mental and emotional distress in a new light. The training explores mental health as a contested field and the implications of this in terms of language and how we tell mental health stories.
The training also looks at the emerging area of trauma. It explores how becoming trauma-informed can help news professionals to add greater depth to their news reports and bring out the hidden human stories, as well as developing their understanding of how dysregulation of the body’s nervous system can impact their work.
If you are interested in our training for news professionals and journalists, click here to find out more.
Supporting holders and experiencers
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When someone experiences extreme mental and emotional distress and altered states, the experience is usually witnessed and supported by their family and friends. We describe people experiencing distress as experiencers, and the people who support them as holders. Although intimately intertwined with the experiencer’s journey, Safely Held Spaces sees the holder’s experience as a journey in its own right.
That’s why we provide online weekly peer support groups for family members and friends, to help them make sense of their own experiences as they meet the many challenges that being in this supporting role brings.
We’ve also carried out research to better understand and describe the holder’s journey, so that we can start to influence the kinds of support that are available for supporters. And we are exploring a new approach to home-based support for experiencers and holders, in collaboration with Soteria UK Network, that we are calling ‘Compassionate Crew'.
Signposting to support
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We also think it's really important that information about where to find safe spaces and other forms of support is readily available. So SHS is collaborating with the Hub of Hope, the UK’s leading mental health support signposting tool, to help people to find a range of different support options in their communities.
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Some of these activities are already in progress, and some are still in development. If you would like to get involved in creating and shaping Safely Held Spaces’ work, or just to find out more, please get in touch.