A conversation about suicide over breakfast. What happened at One Team Gov Breakfast meetup ?
That’s a title to conjure with. Perhaps you wondered what I’m talking about. Perhaps you scrolled on by, then thought you wanted to know more. Perhaps you felt uncomfortable.
Suicide is a fact in our society. But it’s not something that we widely talk about. One Team Gov believe it should be.
On 19 August,we “took over” One Team Gov breakfast meetup — inviting Mental Health First Aiders (MHFAs) and Mental Health Advocates (MHAs) from across the public sector to join us and start an important conversation about Suicide Prevention.
This was a precursor to an event we will be running on 10 September, World Suicide Prevention Day, or #WSPD2020. We know that things are better when we design them together, and when we create spaces to develop new relationships and build on ideas and conversations. Using our regular breakfast meetup enabled us to test our technology, and to understand a bit more about what people want and need from our event in September.
In the spirit of working in the open, and supporting others within our community to learn and run their own events, we wanted to share some of what we’ve learned. This post incorporates:
- messages left by attendees in the group chat function on the day,
- emails from attendees,
- notes taken from the collaborative “whiteboards” used for table discussions,
- responses to the feedback form that went to attendees the day after the event, and,
- thoughts from the organising team’s retrospective.
Who joined us?
We had 123 sign ups and, of that, 97 attendees actually joined us on the day (around 79%). People attended from 24 central government departments or organisations, as well as local government, charities and the private sector.
While we don’t have a breakdown of the people who were in the room on the day, we do have a breakdown of attendees who signed up to receive an invitation; the highest proportion of sign ups were from HMRC and then Land Registry.
Many of our attendees were trained Mental Health First Aiders (MHFAs) or Mental Health Advocates (MHAs) and of that number we estimate that around two thirds of these sign ups were women.
We were overwhelmed with the response to the event and appreciate everyone who took time out of their day to join us.
What did we discuss?
Our usual One Team Gov breakfasts use a method called Lean Coffee, where attendees raise topics and vote for their favourites on the day. As we knew we would be tight on time, we asked attendees to raise topics via a Fun Retro board in the week leading up to the event, we also pre-populated this with some topics that the organising team wanted to discuss.
On the day, we gave attendees 5 minutes to vote on the topics that interested them the most, with each attendee getting 3 votes.
The topics we covered were:
- When faced with a person at work who you believe to be at risk of suicide, what actions would you take to support them?
- Do you feel equipped to have suicide prevention conversations?
- What are some of the best ways to promote suicide prevention?
- How do we create more emotionally intelligent workplaces where all colleagues become more self aware and more able to support each other?
- How have MHFAs found their role whilst working from home? What have been the difficulties and what has been successful?
Our Technology choices:
In the run up to the event some people raised concerns about the tool we used for voting, called Fun Retro, and rightly suggested that the word “Fun” was inappropriate given the subject matter. In the future we will be clearer and ensure that all attendees know when we are speaking about brand or tool names.
We were expecting around 100 attendees on the day, but wanted to foster small scale conversations and enable our attendees to have a One Team Gov experience; meeting new people making connections across boundaries.
As a result, we chose a tool called Remo as our virtual conference platform. It was something we had used at breakfast meetups before, so it was known to many of us. Plus, it gave us the control we needed as an organising team; enabling us to speak to everyone at once and to send messages to all attendees, while also enabling people to have smaller, more personal, discussions on ‘tables’ of up to 8 people.
The whiteboard functionality meant that we could also keep notes and encourage our attendees to make notes of their conversations that we could refer back to later.
However, we also knew that this would be a new tool for many, and that some may find joining from their organisation’s devices difficult (as some government departments implement firewalls for certain websites or tools). So we opted to recommend two browsers to attendees, as well as suggesting that if they had personal devices they should consider using them.
Despite adding this information as joining instructions to the meeting invite and emailing this to attendees, as well as following up with an email on the evening before the event, many attendees did not realise that they would be using a new tool.
This meant that on the morning of the event many people struggled to gain access. The organising team spent a lot of time troubleshooting and supporting attendees, and as such we kicked off slightly later than anticipated. If we were to run an event of this scale again, we would be sure to make the communications clearer, more regular, and would opt to run a “drop-in” session with attendees to talk them through how to access the tool and get the most out of the experience.
“Found Remo to be a nightmare! Overly complicated. Too many screens and boxes to click on. With the subject being emotionally difficult, I found the technical issues and getting used to this completely different program very distracting from the session itself and frustrating. Left before the end due to this.” (MHFA Breakfast takeover attendee feedback)
However other attendees though using a new tool commented that they had enjoyed the experience. Many used the whiteboard to good effect, keeping notes that our organising team has since reviewed to influence our thinking.
We also know that some attendees had bandwidth, camera or microphone difficulties which meant that they struggled to participate fully in the discussions, these were much less straightforward for our organising team to fix as they could be caused by a number of reasons. However, this left some attendees frustrated.
Some attendees advised that they would reconsider attending our event in September dependent on the technology we choose, so we are thinking very carefully about this.
What did we learn?
We learned that Mental Health First Aiders (MHFAs) carry a large emotional burden and often take on anxiety and worry beyond their immediate role and into their personal lives. People who have experience of a friend, family member or colleague’s death due to suicide also often hold ‘survivor’s guilt’ feeling desire and responsibility to promote suicide prevention. We wondered whether this pressure and work to support others was evenly distributed, if it should be something for the organisation, and that there’s perhaps a need to lift this from individual shoulders.
We learned that MHFAs recognise that they’re not experts — indeed their training recommends that they signpost someone to more professional support if they are identified at risk of suicide. But that it’s difficult for the MHFAs to remain detached.
We learned that MHFAs can feel nervous about giving advice as they don’t want to make things worse; and that the people talking to them can be worried about confidentiality. We wondered if there’s more that can be done to reassure people, and to break any perceived Departmental “loyalties” by making the MHFA role more independent.
We were reminded that there is so much value in microactions. Being conscious of your body language and really listening. Starting conversations and meetings with a check in. Supporting. Sharing your own story to help start the conversation.
And we learned that the MHFA role has got harder in lockdown. The lack of ability to see physical triggers and reactions are making it harder to have conversations, but we are all getting better at using the technology. Some MHFAs would actively check in with people if they saw changes in their behaviour in the office, and are finding new ways to do that when working remotely.
Our attendees also shared some links to resources:
What’s next?
We want to continue this conversation, and are holding another event as part of World Suicide Prevention Day. We’ve just announced the first of our Contributors (those joining us on the day and speaking about their work) and you can find out more about that here:
How can I get involved?
You can sign up for our event on 10 September on eventbrite
To hear more about the event as we announce it simply follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or check our bloggroll (below) where you’ll find all of the information in one place.
We hope to see you there.
