YOU get the sense that nothing in Poppy Jaman’s world ever slows down – trying to fight the good fight when it comes to mental health is always perpetually busy. So it proved…yet. “You know, 2023, I feel like was a year of bedding down,” the founder and vice-chair of the MindForward Alliance UK told the GG2 Power List. “We came out of the pandemic, and then I think there was a bit of a high like, ‘Oh, my God, life exists again, we can connect with people’. And we also took stock of the fact that overnight during the pandemic my organisation went global.
We were working with UK businesses, and then suddenly, we were working in a much deeper way with global organisations, and 2023 was taking stock, where is our energy going to go, because in the mental health world, or certainly for my organisation, we really spread ourselves out, and we had to just go, ‘Okay, we can’t continue to do all of those things’.
MindForward Alliance [MFA] describes itself as a global chapter developed by Mental Health Alliance, a not-for-profit membership organisation which Jaman founded in 2017. MFA has branches in the UK, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia, with a mission to unite businesses globally to set the standards for workplace mental health. The cost-of-living cri sis and the aftereffects of the pandemic have made things worse when it comes to mental health, she said. “The data around the world shows that after a global crisis, or after a catastrophic incident, for a year, two years, after wards, you see the impact on people and leaders. We started to see quite a lot of that, and 2023 was definitely that. In the UK, pre-pandemic, the mental health crisis was there, particularly for the younger generation. We had the impact of lockdown. And then on top of the a ready sad and difficult situation around mental health, there were under resourced services; we saw that in its darker sense. Just within my family, there were individuals who were on the waiting list for therapy for 12 months. So, I saw that among my family, and that played out in the community as well.” In 2022, Jaman was one of 20 bosses of mental health organisations who had written and signed an open letter to the prime minister urging him to step in and stop suicides which are being caused by the cost-of-living crisis.
“We have seen NHS Eng land invest in services, but I don’t think it will ever fully catch up with demand unless we have a complete review and restructure of the way that the mental health services have been put in place,” she told the GG2 Power List. “It was disappointing for us that the Mental Health Act review that we asked for, which was promised, that there was pledges made and then there was a U-turn on that.” “We’ve put together what we call a cross gov ernmentmental health plan, asking they look at the whole system again. We make some very clear recommendations on what needs to change and amend. I think that needs proper attention, for anything to change, but not just at tention and tokenism.
We need investment, we need a national lead at the highest point of influence, a change of programme that is going to make a difference longer term,” she added. Jaman has been at the forefront of creating di verse workplaces, being part of campaign group Change the Race Ratio. It is an association of UK business leaders who are using their influence to increase ethnic minority representation on boards and in leadership positions within UK FTSE 100 business es. “I feel very strongly that workplaces need to get this right because my recovery would not have happened, if I did not have a job that fostered and strengthened my identity, beyond the diagnosis, beyond being a Bengali girl, beyond being a brown woman,” she told a global audience in 2021. And this ‘Bengali girl’ has had her fair share of challenges. Her family arranged her marriage when she was 17. “For years, I described it as arranged because I was trying really hard to be diplomatic and make sure that I didn’t bring reputational harm or hurt my par ents. But some years into de scribing it as an arranged marriage, I changed my mind, and I decided it wasn’t arranged because I didn’t consent to the marriage, I was forced to agree to get married. That decision then led to significant mental health struggles. And I felt if I didn’t call it out for what it was, then I wasn’t creating psycho logical safety. “I was an incredibly rebellious teenager, and one of the things that my family decided was to try and contain me and help me see what the right way of being was and that was to take me to Bangladesh and get me married. So that’s what happened.” At the time, her mission was to cope with the trauma inflicted upon her. “I found myself in Bangladesh, and actually one of my coping mechanisms was self-harming.
I was doing quite a lot of reading, and I was doing quite a lot of cleaning. I remember those three things and the routine and structure in my day while I was in Bangladesh, which became very crucial. “I also became very much into my faith. I became a practising Muslim during that period, praying five times a day. I’m not a practising Muslim now, but if I think about this, for my 17-year-old self, what I was doing is finding ways to connect with spirituality to give me a sense of grounding. I imagine lots of people will be able to relate to that.” Her work with the bosses of FTSE 100 com panies means they are breaking taboos. She said they were sharing personal stories of being vulnerable caused by work-related stress, and suddenly, it has become OK to admit you need help, without anyone thinking you are weak. But Jaman does want the government to do more – creating a mental health commissioner, for example. “In order for change to happen, we need someone reporting directly to the prime minister on the state of the nation regarding mental health, and one component of that will be the Mental Health Act. “But another component of that is how do we bring health, social care, community services, the voluntary sector, all of those components in one place so that we have a systematic approach and an aligned approach? I don’t think you can have one central organisation dictating everything that needs to happen. I do think there needs to be accountability at the top, but delivery needs to happen at a local, community level. That’s the only way that we’re going to get nuanced change.”