Workshop: Destigmatising mental illness in the workplace environment

Location: Yoga room, Hans-Fallada-Str. 11

Time: 2.00 - 3.30 p.m. 

Please sign-up here [de]

The project "The Working Mind" aims to transfer an evidence-based, complex intervention (The Working Mind) for destigmatising mental illness in the work place environment to a German language environment and to evaluate it in the university setting.

The intervention has been successfully used, for example, in health care work and post-secondary education, and uses methods of contact-based interventions and psychoeducation to reduce stigma across all disorders, including particularly affected disorders such as schizophrenia.

The approach based on the real world and the university setting allows an analysis of different facets of stigmatisation and a comprehensive participation of those affected and of multipliers, since in addition to being personally affected

1. students also represent the future members of staff in medicine, nursing and psychotherapy
2. members of the university can discuss mental health with colleagues and students and, for example, support each other in seeking help, and
3. management staff’s destigmatisation of mental illness for the sake of healthy leadership can become programmatically visible in management decisions (e.g. staff planning), fostering a cultural change at the university towards an open approach to mental illness.

Accordingly, devising a concept for the continued intervention in a university setting as a landmark project for the German higher education sector is an important goal of the project.

In summary, we hope to gain answers to the following questions:

1. Can this intervention reduce the stigmatisation of mental health problems in different status groups of the university across all disorders and do the effects of the intervention persist for more than six months after the end of the intervention?
2. Does the intervention lead to a greater willingness to talk about mental health problems (if personally affected) and to make use of support services?
3. Which factors that promote and hinder the (sustainable) implementation of the intervention can be identified and how can these be addressed in the university setting in the long term in order to make it possible for the intervention to become permanent?