What to campaign about

There's an awful lot that needs to change about mental health in this country. Just to name a few, you might want to see:

  • Better physical healthcare of people with mental illness
  • Higher funding of services
  • More service user involvement
  • More people getting the best in medication and treatment
  • An end to stigma and discrimination
  • New types of services, such as dual diagnosis or crisis houses
  • An end to negative coverage of mental health issues in the media
  • Positive mental health policies within local companies
  • More support for service users to use direct payments
  • Race equality achieved in mental health services
  • Dignity and respect for people whilst in inpatient care.

So it’s hard to know where to start – and the list above hardly covers everything that you might want to campaign to change.

But you need to be specific when you start a campaign. Whilst these changes might be interconnected in a sense, you can’t start campaigning for all of them at once. You’ll only confuse people or make them think ‘oh, it’s all too difficult, there’s so much to be done’.

So work out what you want to campaign for first.

You might later want to run campaigns for the other changes, but each separate campaign needs a separate goal.

There might be one particular change that you are passionate about, in which case this is the obvious thing to choose – but do check it against the questions below to make sure it’s achievable.

So, before deciding on your campaign, ask yourself:

  1. Which change seems the most important to make?
  2. Which change is the most urgent?
  3. Do you have potential local allies in a campaign for any one of these changes? If possible, you want a mix of service users, carers, professionals (psychiatrists, GPs, nurses) and NHS managerial staff (Trust employees) helping you.
  4. Are there Rethink Mental Illness campaigns running nationally on this issue that you could replicate at a local level?
  5. Which change could be brought about relatively easily?
  6. Which change could be brought about quite quickly?
  7. Which change do you have the time and capability to make a difference on
  8. Which change seems ‘hot’ at the moment? Are relevant issues already being debated, e.g. in the local health trust, local council or local newspaper? Is there any new research or any new reports nationally that link into any one
    of these changes?

The answers to all of these questions should influence your decision about what to campaign for.

Above all, be realistic: make sure that you have the time, resources and commitment necessary to make a difference in the campaign you choose. There’s little point in taking on a goal that you know you can’t make a difference on, even if you’d really like to.

If you’ve never run a campaign before, start with a small goal first. You can then build contacts and allies that you can use in bigger campaigns. If you start with
something small and have a success, you’ll have a lot of momentum personally to move on to something bigger. And other people will be more likely to support you in a bigger campaign. If you start too big, it’ll be harder to get a success and you and your supporters may become demoralised.

Things you might want to campaign for locally are:

  • More positive coverage of people with mental illness in local media
  • Local funding for a new service 
  • Opening of a service in an area where people are hostile to it
  • Better understanding of mental illness among local JobCentre staff and employers
  • Longer appointments at GP surgeries for people with mental illness 
  • Better information about mental illness at GP surgeries
  • Better access to cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and talking therapies
  • Mental health awareness training for GP receptionists.

What you want to campaign for is your aim. This can be quite general. For example, ‘decreasing the stigma attached to mental illness through positive media
coverage’ or ‘increasing support to people with mental illness through a new community service’.

But you also need to work out the objectives.

It’s important that your objectives for your campaign are specific. If you don’t have specific objectives, how can you be sure that you’ve achieved them?

A good way to check if your objectives are specific enough is to try and imagine an event which would symbolise your objectives being met.

For example, if your objective is increasing positive coverage of mental illness, the event could be the publication of the local newspaper including a feature on a prominent local person and their recovery from mental illness.

If you were campaigning for longer appointments at GP surgeries, the event could be receiving a letter from a Practice Manager promising to give people with mental illness the option of longer appointments.

Your objectives should also be measurable, achievable, relevant and time-limited. They need to have deadlines in them.

Of course, you can amend your objectives as your campaign moves along, if necessary. You may, for example, realise that an objective was not realistic in the
time allotted, but that if you extend it by six months, you have a good chance of success.

Your aim and objectives are not there to frustrate you or to trap you, but to make sure that your campaign is focused and you don’t get distracted on the way to
success. If you’ve decided what you want to change, don’t spend your time and energy on activities which will not help your aim and objectives. It’s as simple as that.

Once you’ve worked out what your aims and objectives are, add them to the Campaign Planning matrix. Next, you need to work out who your targets are…