In July the Trust began a social impact pilot project, Time to Trust: Exploring Anxiety, run by the Social Impact Director, Kelly Tyler. With the pilot now finished, Kelly reports on the pilot and what’s next.
The Pilot
The pilot project explored how psychosynthesis-informed perspectives, intention and actions can help to alleviate its participants’ experiences of anxiety. The Trust invited 10 participants to meet weekly to discuss these experiences.
As a study from the University Of Queensland states: “If everyone visited their local parks for half an hour each week, there would be 7% fewer cases of anxiety & depression and 9% fewer cases of high blood pressure.” Particular attention over the pilot was paid to using nature as a lens through which participants could approach their anxiety.
Some activities the group undertook included a visit to Crossbones Gardens, a community gardening site in a burial ground, to ‘vision quest’ in nature. As they worked outdoors, the group held questions regarding themselves and anxiety and took notice of the signs, synchronicities and feelings – exploring what it’s like for their souls to speak.
The pilot is now complete and Kelly is looking to what the next stage in the project might bring: “[Through these activities], the group reportedly began to create space between themselves and the anxiety symptoms that they were experiencing (GAD, social, health, phobias, existential and eco-anxiety). Many participants felt aligned with the concept that they were more than their anxiety.
“It was fascinating to see how freeing the participants felt by being part of a group with people who shared their experience. It helped to reduce the stigma associated with anxiety within the group and highlighted how common the condition is.”
Next steps
External factors like the cost-of-living crisis, climate change and COVID-19 have recently created uncertain environments within society, and the fallout is reflected nationally: anxiety was the most commonly-reported mental health issue in 2021-22 (BACP, March 2022). It also contributed to 50% of all work-related ill health reported that same year [2], with 1.46 million people being referred to IAPT (Improving Access to Psychological Therapies) for therapeutic support [3].
Combing CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) & medication is currently the most effective and researched approach to alleviating the symptoms of anxiety [4]. However, in our project, we learned that participants felt united by community. Community was identified as being the most impactful influence on their anxiety symptoms.
Systemic Anxiety
Rather than focusing on clinical intervention, this project is now looking at the systemic nature of anxiety. We seek to better understand the whole system and offer a joined-up community approach to working with the condition. By supporting individuals who identify with the symptoms of anxiety – as well as the label itself – we aim to reduce the stigma associated with the condition and work collaboratively with local organisations. This will hopefully provide spaces in which people experiencing anxiety can explore their experience and create meaningful and supportive connections.
Gabor Mate alludes to this approach in his recent book, The Myth of Normal [5]. He states that the solution is not to pathologise mental health conditions, given that while we live in a time with so much access to psychological services, research, coaching etc., society’s mental health is still declining. Instead, he posits, we need to look systemically at what creates these symptoms.
Further learning
Many of the participants of the Exploring Anxiety pilot acknowledged that they had been experiencing symptoms like procrastination, perfectionism, insomnia, overwhelm and over-thinking for years before actually associating them with the label of anxiety.
Our next steps with the project will be to run surveys and focus groups within our community to further understand how many people are experiencing these symptoms, and how they are affecting their lives. We also want to learn how many people are officially diagnosed with anxiety. This will help us better articulate the demand for support and what current resources are being successfully accessed. The hope is that this information will support the Trust’s applications for funding, to run a further four groups within our community.
If you would like to learn more about the Exploring Anxiety project, please email our Social Impact Director, Kelly Tyler.
References
[1] As reported by the Mental Health Foundation, 45% of the UK’s homeless are living with a mental illness.
[2] The Health & Safety Executive’s annual report