SAVE THE DATE!
Please mark 5th December 2024 with a big red X on your calendar, as we are very excited to announce that this will be the date for the very first Platform For Life Christmas Fundraising Marathon!
In 12 hours, we hope to raise £10,000 with fun, frolics and mayhem. We will have our Mental Elves, Father Christmas walking the walls, online competitions, our special Christmas Cracker Raffle, specially designed Christmas cards, and even our very own pantomime, as part of a gala evening, at Chester Storyhouse’s Garret Theatre, to end the day.
Why SAVE THE DATE?
Because we really need you to help us. You could help with our activities, or you could add your own ideas and activities to the list. We have some suggestions to wet your appetite…
Why do we need your help?
This is the serious side to this wonderful day.
There are families struggling with poor mental health in Chester, who we really want to help. There are children, young people and adults in our communities, who, this Christmas, and way beyond, will be struggling with poor mental health conditions, but unable to access the right support. They may fall between the cracks in terms of eligibility for NHS support, or they could be stuck on an endless waiting list while their life is deteriorating, and they simply can’t afford to pay for the help they need.
What is mental health?
Mental health, and its’ importance, is bandied around everywhere these days, but do we truly understand what is meant by mental health? And why it really is so important that we look after it?
Well in a nutshell our mental health is our emotional, psychological and social well-being. It impacts on how we think, how we feel, and how we act. It determines how we handle stress, how we interact with those around us, and our ability to make healthy choices.
So really, it is very important as it pretty much controls how well we are able to exist.
What causes poor mental health?
Poor mental health can affect anybody, it isn’t selective. When we talk about poor mental health conditions, we are talking about conditions including depression, anxiety and PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder), probably being the most common. These conditions are actually our brains’ way of protecting us from the events and situations that can happen in life, that we physically or mentally aren’t able to cope with. Our brain sees these events and situations, known as stressors, as threats to our life, and wants us to fight them off, or flee from them as quickly as possible. Hence the ‘fight or flight’ response.
So, if we consider the two most common poor mental health conditions, Depression and Anxiety. Depression slows down, or depresses our normal bodily systems and functions, to prevent damage from our threats and save us energy to enable us to respond appropriately in order to remove us from these dangerous or harmful stressors. Anxiety on the other hand speeds up our reactions, to enable us to respond appropriately and more quickly to remove or get away from the stressors. On a short-term basis, these work very well as a stress response, getting us out of threatening situations. The problems arise when the stressors we encounter are very significant and/or remain in our lives for a prolonged period of time. In these cases, the body continues the stress responses for longer periods than would normally be considered as healthy, and living in a stressed state, with these poor mental health conditions, can then become our new normal way of living. This can then result in conditions such as PTSD. The stressors that can trigger poor mental health, are things we can all come face to face with in our lives, including:
- Financial worries
- Work problems, redundancy or unemployment
- Traumas such as a car accident or bereavement
- Social isolation following changes in our circumstances
- Relationship breakdowns
- Domestic violence or abuse
- Having certain conditions, such as neurodivergent conditions including ADHD and ASD (Autism) which can make our mental health more susceptible to heading into poor mental health conditions
Can we improve poor mental health?
Yes, absolutely we can.
The first step is to recognise that you, or someone else is heading down that path, and to stop it as quickly as possible to prevent poor mental health developing into long-term illness. So, here at Platform For Life, one of our key priorities is early intervention.
Nobody is an island, and one of our priorities is to ensure that everyone knows ‘it’s ok to reach out and say you aren’t ok’. It’s also ok to ask someone you care about, you work with, or you support professionally, when you see negative changes in the way they are engaging in their life, or reacting to those around them, or even in their appearance, whether they are ok. We don’t mean just asking them once as you pass them on the stairs, if you are worried, make the time and keep asking. It is important to see how far you, or they have gone down this path towards poor mental health with what they are coping with. It is also important to be open and honest about whether it possible for you or them to remove the stressors from your or their life, return from your state of poor mental health to good, positive mental health without support or not. If not then finally, it is important to know that ‘it is ok to ask for help’. No matter who you are, what you do, what your responsibilities are, it is ok to ask for help.
The difficulty comes when you, the someone you care about, the someone you work with, or the someone you support professionally is in a situation whereby they may not be able to access the right support at the right time. It may be that you’re not eligible for services that are available through the NHS, or that you are at risk of serious deterioration in the time it would take to access support, or the service simply isn’t available, and you can’t afford to pay to go privately. That is where we step in.
Remaining, or leaving someone in a state of poor mental health, unable to remove or cope with the stressors they are dealing with, can lead to long-term, even lifelong ill-health. In some cases, tragically, this can even lead to people making life-changing, or even life-ending, catastrophic, heartbreaking choices, like self-harm and suicide.
So why do we need your help?..Our Christmas Wish
We need your help to prevent anyone in the Chester area, who is eligible for our support, to reach the point where they can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.
At Platform For Life, we are incredibly lucky to have the most wonderful team of Counsellors, Art Therapists, Play Therapists and a Family Support Worker. They are qualified, and highly experienced, each with their own specialism, enabling them to work with children, young people and adults, and provide the support for families, to enable them to find the right way for them to improve their poor mental health and consequently their quality of life.
Sadly, as with everything, there is a cost to this, and as a charity, we have to find ways to cover this cost, to help the families who need our help this Christmas, and way beyond. Post-pandemic and with the cost-of-living crisis, this gets harder all the time, but we are determined.
So, for this Christmas, our Christmas wish, is that you would consider joining us on 5th December, to have a fantastic day, and do whatever you would like to do, to help us achieve our Christmas marathon fundraising target of £10,000 to help us continue and grow our vital support.
What will £10,000 enable us to do?
£10,000 will enable us to:
- Fully fund112 counselling, art therapy or parent support sessions to parents/carers/adults in the community
- Provide a full days’ support a week, for a whole school year, in a local primary or secondary school, for children and young people who are struggling (4 counselling, art therapy or play therapy sessions a week)
- Run a community Wellbeing Drop-In group session for a whole year
Want to join us to make a difference on 5th December 2024?
Fantastic, thank you so much!!
All you have to do now, is download the expression of interest form below, complete it, and submit it to us.
We can’t wait to hear from you!
Don’t forget ….
Your Mental Elf is for life, not just for Christmas!! (Sorry, Mental Health!)