PESI UK Announces Free Recovery-Themed Mental Health Summit

This year’s Mental Health Awareness Week arrives at a time when the world feels poised between crisis and recovery – between the devastation of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the potential for a reimagined future. 

The vaccine rollout and subsequent re-openings have allowed us to feel that an end to the pandemic is finally in sight. 

But they have also brought in to view much that had lain hidden under cover of lockdown. 

As schools return, services resume and families and friends reunite, we are starting to appreciate just how huge a toll the last 12 months have had on our mental health. We know that many who had never experienced mental health issues prior to the pandemic are now struggling with their psychological and emotional wellbeing. It is also clear that those who were already most vulnerable and marginalised in society have taken the biggest knocks. 

Recovery, in this context, can’t just mean building back.

Whether we are talking about the mental health of individuals or communities, the task is to build back fairer, more sustainably, and using everything we have at our disposal… from the latest therapeutic insights to the wide lens perspectives of leading charities, and from tried and tested clinical tools to the latest social research.

Recovery has to mean coming together – whether at the level of national mental health strategy, the therapeutic relationship, or firing and wiring neurons. 

Which is why PESI UK is inviting you and your colleagues to join us this Mental Health Awareness Week for a completely free online event. 

The PESI UK Mental Health Awareness Summit: Individual and Community Recovery, Healing Trauma, Grief and Loss, will take place from Monday May 10 to Wednesday May 12. 

Bringing together eight leading clinicians and thought leaders, it will offer specially delivered talks and live Q&As addressing the key psychological issues facing our post-pandemic world. 

You’ll hear from Grief Works author Julia Samuel about finding meaning in a changing landscape of loss, and from Dan Siegel on using neuroscience to support resilience. You’ll learn about recovery and stabilisation from trauma experts Bessel van der Kolk and Janina Fisher. And you’ll have the chance to reflect on the state of the nation’s mental health, and routes to recovery, with Paul Farmer, CEO of Mind. 

We’ve also invited BACP president David Weaver to talk to you about what counsellors and psychotherapists can be doing to help pick up the pieces following the pandemic – including from a social justice perspective. 

Whether you are a psychotherapist, counsellor, psychologist, social worker, psychiatrist, teacher or occupational therapist, or anyone with an interest in the future of our mental health, we hope you will join us this Mental Health Awareness Week – to size up the scale of the challenge we are facing, resource ourselves for recovery, and begin, together, to reimagine a better future. 

For more information and to register click here