Designing better mental healthcare facilities

Helping to develop lifelong resilience

With, as he puts it, ‘funding shortfalls in the billions, year-long wait times for CAMHS referrals, and young people in crisis being left in limbo’, Phil Tottman, the developer of Book of Beasties:

The Mental Wellness Card Game, which won the Concept Product Innovation of the Year Award at the 2019 Design in Mental Health Awards in May, explains how the mental health pressures facing UK schools and young people today inspired him and a small team to develop the imaginative and thought-provoking game.

I believe we can consistently embark on the road to the resolution of an issue by having a simple conversation. Be those issues physical, mental, internal, external, temporary, or terminal; the human brain is such a powerful machine that it can adapt to, cope with, and bounce back from, the darkest of places. A conversation, in my opinion, is the key to that kind of resilience, the crux of coping – if you will – with inevitable adversity. The sharing of concerns or traumas with each other lets us know that we are not alone in our experiences. That others feel the same fears, and fear the same feelings as we do, and that there are plenty of ways in which each individual manages all of this that others may find helpful, is often reassuring. 

That is potentially one of the main benefits of counselling; the patient can feel empowered to speak openly and freely without the fear of judgment or marginalisation. It is ‘better out than in’, after all.

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