Solent Mind

We offer a range of advocacy, information and advice services to help support you in ways which are tailored to your individual needs.

• Employment Support – Vocational Advice,Training

• Home Based Support

Floating Support We offer a 'floating support’ service for people with mental health problems in Southampton who have issues with their housing. Floating Support describes the way in which we deliver help to those who need it, which is by visiting people in their homes or in their local community rather than by expecting people to come to us.

• Community Support – Older People

• Social Inclusion

Resource Centres - Our resource centres are community hubs from which a wide range of activity happens, offering support. From poetry groups to gardening projects

We have centres at Marcella House in the New Forest, at Priory Gardens in Winchester and at the Café Club in Southampton.

• Social groups

Our social groups offer safe and secure settings for people to come together to join in activities. These are offered in community settings.

• Mayfield Nurseries

Thriving working nursery, horticultural therapy and social enterprise – Mayfield is one of our most exciting services.

• What is the Money Advice Project?

The Money Advice Project (Southampton) provides a service for people that have debt issues or need help claiming benefits, and because of their mental health issues are unable to access other agencies. We can spend more time, give support and visit clients in their own home. Our aim is not only to sort out our clients debts and benefit issues, but help improve their mental and physical wellbeing in the longer term. Who can access it? Adults experiencing severe mental health problems and who are unable to access other money advice agencies. Who can I contact for more information? Please contact the Money Advice team on 07825984734 or email: moneyadvice@solentmind.org.uk

54 Henstead Road Southampton

Mind has a working definition of Recovery which comes from the National Institute of Mental Health in America. It says Recovery is: "The uniquely personal and ongoing act of claiming and gaining the capacity to take control of life that is personally meaningful and satisfying, with opportunities to perceive her/himself as a valued citizen. The person may develop and use their self-determination to grow beyond and thrive, despite the presence of the limitations and challenges invited and imposed by distress, its treatment and the personal and environmental understandings made of them."

The recovery 'model' requires a change of approach on the part of both the professionals and the service users. Service users have to be prepared to step out of the 'sick role' and start to regard themselves as autonomous people with the capacity to come through a period of mental distress and develop their individuality, self awareness and self acceptance. Professionals need also to look at people's potential, and to stop being managers and start being facilitators. They need to start looking first at people's potential for development rather than at how their mental distress may restrict their lives.

The Recovery approach aims to see service users holistically, as complete people who have the capacity to cope with their distress in such a way that they are able to participate in a full life, developing self esteem and self determination, and including, for example, being allowed to make their own mistakes and learn from them - just as the majority of people do in our society. It aims to focus on identifying realistic life goals for service users and enabling them to achieve them.

We at Solent Mind adhere to this approach in delivery of all of our services, which are highly personalised and always place the individual at the very centre of all we do.

Person Centred Our approach to service delivery is a highly personalised one, offering increased choice and control to service users by way of the setting of goal focussed outcomes and the service user taking some responsibility for achieving them, with the support of our staff and sometimes other service users. It is how we then measure these and then what we do with the information, that will help improve service delivery alongside the continous improvement in place via quality measurements.

The main way in which we apply this approach is through support planning, which is common in many of our services. This process is client led from the very beginning, and each service user is responsible for identifying from the outset what their aspirations are with regard to what they want to achieve within their time in the service.