Our campaigns

Our campaign successes

Over the past year, Mind has been working hard to improve services and to make sure that you are treated fairly, positively and with respect.

Here are some of the positive changes we've made and the successes we've had.

Thank you to everyone who has taken part in our campaigns and helped us to achieve this!

Our Daily Stigma newspaper has reached hundreds of thousands of people – fighting misconceptions and stigma about disability benefits and the people who claim them
We have forced changes to the Government’s welfare reform plans, including improving the assessment for the Personal Independence Payment which will replace Disability Living Allowance from 2013
Our work to improve the Work Capability Assessment is having a significant impact – since the first Harrington review in 2010, the proportion of applicants being declared ‘Fit for Work’ has fallen by over 10 per cent

We launched our report into the state of crisis care, Listening to experience, securing a parliamentary debate during which the Minister for Care Services gave our campaign his full support. Following the debate, we took 45 ‘crisis care champions’ who had used crisis services to Westminster to meet their MP

We had a very successful launch of the second phase of Mind’s Taking Care of Business campaign in May 2011 with wide ranging media coverage in trade press and nationals including BBC Breakfast, the Independent on Sunday, the FT, the Mirror meaning we reached over 22 million people.
We also launched a social media campaign encouraging people to talk about mental health in the workplace, the “elephant in the room”. The elephant's Facebook wall became a safe place for people to talk about their mental health problems - he now has 3900 Facebook friends and witnesses dozens of conversations each week. He won the Third Sector digital campaign of the week in May 2011 and then won the June 2011 Creative Showcase award. Mind has been awarded a grant to expand the peer support platform so it can reach a further 5,000 people
Supported by AXA, Mind held a high-level government and business summit with a wide range of employers, such as Barclays, Deloitte, National Grid and Veolia, among others, to discuss mental health in the workplace, identify challenges and develop solutions. Lord Freud attended from Government. A report was published in September 2011
In December 2011, we published disclosure tools for managers which we jointly produced with the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, to facilitate conversations about mental health at work and support employers to respond to disclosure by employees.

Our We need to talk campaign has led to significant funding commitments by successive Governments to widen access to psychological therapies

We persuaded the government to insert a vital clause into its Health and Social Care Bill, explicitly putting mental health on an equal footing to physical health in the NHS for the first time
We persuaded the Government not to make damaging changes to the way ‘aftercare’ is provided to people returning to the community after a stay in hospital, so people still get support from both health and social care services
Our lobbying with other mental health organisations led to strong commitments to mental health in the draft Mandate to the NHS Commissioning Board
We secured important mental health indicators in the new Public Health Outcomes Framework, which will track local authorities’ progress to improving the mental health and wellbeing of their population
With other mental health organisations, we influenced a strong cross-Government mental health strategy. We worked with the Department of Health to develop an implementation framework to help local organisations work together and take a range of actions to help implement the strategy.

Our work to raise the profile of mental health in Parliament led to four hour debate on the subject, during which four MPs spoke about out about their own mental health problems for the first time
Mind helped support the Mental Health (Discrimination) Bill as it passed its difficult second reading in Parliament. We helped to create a successful campaign video and now the Government has given its ongoing support to the Bill which will be further discussed in Parliamment in late October.