A look back over the first year of the Mental Health Charter for Sport and Recreation

With the Mental Health Charter for Sport and Recreation turning one this month, Hannah Dobbin, Policy Adviser, looks back at it's development and how it has made an impact within the sector when addressing mental health. 

This month the Mental Health Charter for Sport and Recreation celebrates its one-year anniversary. I can’t believe how much has happened since I started working on this back in 2014. I wanted to share with you what’s been done so far and what we hope to achieve in the future.

The Charter came from a shared desire within the sport and recreation sector, along with professional players federations, to come together to do something positive around mental health. The Charter was drafted and launched in March 2015 with the support of then Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, elite athlete ambassadors and school children at the Oval cricket ground.

Since then the Charter has gone from strength to strength and we now have over 240 signatories, all committed to tackling the stigma around mental health. To support signatories, I’ve worked with colleagues at Mind and the Professional Players Federation to produce helpful resources and on Tuesday we published even more including template action plans and an Evidence Summary .

We know that there is a whole range of work going on in the sector around mental health from grassroots to the elite level. Organisations are supporting participants, volunteers and employees to help those dealing with mental health problems, as well as be able to talk about their own problems if they want to. You can see some example action plans here which show what organisations are doing, as well as some case studies of projects and people’s stories.

You can also see which elite athletes support the Charter here and read a blog by world number 9 snooker player Mark Allen about his own personal experiences here.

The first year has been about establishing the Charter and setting the platform for a culture change in sport and recreation around mental health. It’s been great to see how this has been embraced by the sector and beyond. We will continue to support signatories to take action but we also want to build on our influencing work in this area.

On Wednesday, the Alliance and Mind ran a Parliamentary drop-in session to celebrate the one-year anniversary and ask Parliamentarians to sign-up to be Charter Champions. We were thrilled to meet 24 MPs and Peers, including two Government Ministers and a couple of Shadow Ministers, who all signed-up to support the Charter.

And it’s not only the sector that supports physical activity and mental health; our press release on Tuesday highlighted public support too:

• 80% of people agree their mental health is improved if they exercise or are physically active
• 84% of people believe that the Government should invest more money in mental health sport and physical activity programmes
• 85% agreed that GPs, nurses and pharmacists should promote sport and physical activity as a treatment to help people with their mental health

We want Government to further its support and investment in collaborative mental health and physical activity programmes. Over the coming months we will be building our influencing strategy to make this happen.

Thanks to everyone who has got involved and supported the Mental Health Charter for Sport and Recreation so far. We’re still on our journey to tackle stigma around mental health so I look forward to working with you all over the next year to do more.

If you work in physical activity and/or mental health and haven’t yet signed-up please check out the Charter webpages to find out how your organisation can become part of this growing movement.

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