Local charity Retune recently hosted a series of mental health workshops for staff at The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust (PAHT).
The workshops were held as part of a range of health and wellbeing support offered to staff during the pandemic and beyond, aiming to help to improve mental wellbeing through creative actions including singing and drawing.
Tom Ryder, the founder of Retune, who began each workshop by singing and playing the guitar to make everyone feel comfortable, said:
“Mental health is something that everybody should look after, just like you would your physical health – the workshops provide a safe space for people to talk about their own mental health.”
Tom shared his own experiences about being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and how he founded Retune as a way to help everybody look after their own mental health.
During the workshop, participants were encouraged to think about different aspects of their daily lives which could affect their minds and overall mental health, or in Tom’s words, could cause our minds to ‘go out of tune’.
To kickstart this, Tom challenged everybody that attended to help him write a song in five minutes and, after a successful singalong, each person thought about their own lives focusing on things such as their sleep, creativity, activeness and their social lives.
Faustina Ravi, an A&E nurse at PAHT, who attended the workshop, said: “I did not know what to expect from the workshop and it has helped me to see things differently.
“It was good to learn about managing things like our sleep and our social lives because these are things that we do daily but we don’t all know how to put them together to balance our lives and mental health. It has helped me a lot.”