Blog: Ayrshire College on their Mind Thyself App
At Ayrshire College & Students’ Association we used our Student Mental Health Agreement (SMHA) as a tool to help us focus our mental health work and increase accessibility for students. As part of the agreement, we said we would launch a Mental Health App called “Mind Thyself”. We did this during Mental Health Awareness Week. Mind Thyself is accessible to anyone with a smart device, it’s free to use and uses language aimed at young people.
The app is a one stop shop of mental health topics that can be used on the go, is easy to share with others and can connect students to other services that offer support. The content was designed in collaboration with the NHS, so students can be sure that the content is verified and trusted. The app can also initiate phone calls to mental health support phone lines at the click of a button.
An app reduces stigma around mental health because it shifts it from being information you have to go and source, to information that you have on your phone or device all the time and that can be accessed at any time.
For our SMHA, we said we would look at how many people have downloaded the app and have interacted with the content. This will be very basic data, but we hope that in time it will demonstrate that the app is an effective tool that our students are engaging with.
We also hope to further promote, the SMHA and Mind Thyself, during the colleges S-Word Campaign. This campaign, run by our NHS Mental Health Liaison Officer, encourages everyone to talk about suicide and mental health and aims to reduce the stigma and sense of “taboo” that still exists around talking about Suicide and Mental Health.
You can download the Mind Thyself app here.
