Autumn Term Update: Research Lead

Hi everyone,

I hope everyone had a great Christmas break. This is just a brief overview of everything we achieved in Autumn term! Overall, we delivered sessions to 263 high school students in York on eating disorders or self-harm and suicide (see the Table below). We received lots of feedback from our volunteers, students and teachers, and this report aims to highlight some of the main themes from the feedback I’ve looked at.

Student Feedback

Throughout student feedback there was repeated attention drawn to how friendly and the volunteers were, in turn creating an open environment to discuss mental health issues. Furthermore, the materials delivered in the sessions proved to be popular - in particular, our use of videos used in a supplementary fashion to the workshops and the interactive group activities. One students additional comment left after one of the sessions really resonated with what OpenMinds aims to achieve,

“Volunteers made it clear that whatever happens you will always have someone to talk to, and not be alone.”

Teacher Feedback

On the whole, teachers feedback was positive and drew particular importance to the delivery of such sessions by the volunteers who are of a similar age to students. As a result, teachers felt this made the content of sessions more relatable and understandable during the workshops.

Volunteer Feedback

Two particular aspects of our crash courses run in the Autumn term were brought to attention. Firstly, the interactiveness of our quiz (on Kahoot!) at the beginning of the session. Secondly, the ‘experience sharing’ aspect of our sessions where a volunteer is free to share their experiences dealing with mental health issues. This too proved to be popular last year, and if anyone feels they would want to share their story in a non-judgemental, supportive setting please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us!

Areas for Improvement

While our crash courses and workshops receive mostly positive feedback, we take any issues that anyone raises with us sincerely in order to improve the experience of OpenMinds for all involved. Here are the key issues that were noticed in Autumn term, and what we will aim to work towards improving in the upcoming terms:

Filling up our timetable to deliver crash courses in schools - it’s a shame for both the school and volunteers when we have to cancel a session so steps will be taken to reduce the amount of sessions we cancel
Holding seminars for volunteers on aspects of mental health that may not be well understood, e.g. postnatal OCD
Make sure we define all of our key terms to students in the workshops (e.g. ‘stigma’), so that they get the most out of the session
Explain the activities in detail and how to complete the group tasks assigned to students in sessions

Overall, we had a great first term and myself and the committee look forward to seeing what the Spring term holds!