This website builds upon the ILC-UK report 'Moving to social integration of people with severe mental illness: from policy to practice.' It aims to provide access to the key data, policy issues and guidance helpful to advocates operating in the field of severe mental illness. These might include:
- Users
- Carers and families touched by severe mental illness
- NGOs
- Healthcare professionals
- Government policy makers
How can this tool help you?
This website is intended to act as a point of departure for campaigners and interested parties in these groups. Use it as a resource to help identify priority campaign issues and the supporting data and arguments you wish to present. This could be useful for initiatives such as:
- Bringing a group of stakeholders together into a campaign to promote policy improvements
- Mounting letter or email campaigns to your elected representatives
- Writing letters or emails to the media in support of new legislation or in reaction to the reporting of severe mental illness
- Creating information or campaign literature for service users, carers, families and healthcare professionals.
How is the website organised
For ease of use, we have organized the content of this website around ten important areas for policy action in severe mental illness.
Each Area for Action is organized around the following structure:
- Key facts and issues that support your campaign goals in this area
- Areas for action to help you consider your next steps
- Tools and resources that will help you:
- Organise your campaign
- Access supporting guidance and best practice examples from around the world
- Create materials to support your campaign
- Questions to ask to help you focus policy makers on the key issues
- Footnotes to give you the evidence base you need to state your case
Some of the tools ask you to input data and create documents which you can use to begin your campaign work. You may have to research data sources to complete these. Other resources are adapted materials that you may find useful or curated links to external websites, such as data sources, guidance or best practice examples.
Once you feel you have visited all the areas you wish to, please use the Measures of Success checklist to establish a way of identifying your campaign goals and what progress you wish to see over a given time frame.
Please help us improve this website!
In essence, this website is intended to be a both a useful repository of content and a source of inspiration to campaigners. How you use it to strengthen your advocacy work to promote better policies and services for people with severe mental illness is entirely up to you. Please help us to improve this website by registering your contact details with us and providing feedback here.