Looking back, my employer at that time didn’t recognise my symptoms as mental ill-health. They only saw that my concentration levels had decreased and that I had become easily bored.
They interpreted this, along with me being withdrawn and unable to communicate what was happening to me, as signs of me not being interested in my role and the job anymore. So they took the opportunity to make me redundant. And for a while that made my ill-health even worse.
As I recovered, I could see that what had happened to me wasn’t right so I decided to do something about it. I wanted to help others in a similar position and I wanted to tackle the stigma around mental health. So I retrained in mental health and got some valuable voluntary experience working in Adult and Children’s services. Now I work for Rethink Mental Illness and lead their external training team. I know that my ideas and skills can directly make a difference in educating and supporting employers and employees on mental health and workplace wellbeing.
Steve is Head of Training at Rethink Mental Illness and together with his team has delivered mental health first aid to over 4000 people across the UK.
