Time to talk day 2025

Today (Thursday 6 February) marks Time to Talk day, which is all about getting comfortable with and being able to have conversations about mental health. We all have mental health and by talking about it we can support ourselves and others.  

Through our Mind Matters Initiative (MMI), we aim to raise awareness of mental health and mental illness within the veterinary professions, as well as challenge and take steps to address mental health stigma.  

Last year was year one of our five-year strategy and you can read all that we achieved in our 2024 blog. We look forward to encouraging further important conversations, breaking down stigma, and creating more useful evidence-based resources to help support the veterinary community as best as we can in 2025. 

So, what have we got planned? 

Deepening our understanding 

This year marks MMI’s tenth anniversary. Over the past ten years we have come so far in opening up conversations and in our understanding around mental health but still have a long way to go. What do we know and understand about the experiences of the veterinary community? What keeps people well, and what are the risk factors? What skills or tools can individual, teams, or organisations utilise to promote good mental health? How can work be healthy and conducive to good mental health? 

Our latest research, from respondents of the Disability and Chronic Illness Survey, showed that 9% of veterinary surgeons and 19% of veterinary nurses considered themselves as having a mental health condition that has a substantial and long-term effect on their everyday activities (IES, 2024). The survey also revealed that, despite respondents’ disabilities/chronic condition(s), over half (57%) described their physical health as good or very good, while slightly under half (47%) rated their mental health as good or very good. 

There is still work to be done to fully understand the landscape of mental health in the veterinary context, but through doing so we can ensure we have a positive impact. 

Raising awareness 

Accessible and evidence-based information, that can be utilised to make informed health decisions and help raise awareness, is crucial to protecting and supporting our health. We recognise that work and life can make it difficult to join live webinars, and that staring into a screen after a long day is not always desirable. To that end, we will be launching our applied mental health science series, aimed at the wider veterinary community. This will be used not only to raise awareness of mental health conditions, but also provide individuals, managers and leaders with access to high quality, practical information which can then be used to further support themselves or others.  

Conversational skills 

We will continue to offer the ever-popular, subsidised Mental Health First Aid training to all veterinary professionals and team members. These courses sell out very quickly, and we’ll be announcing more dates in the spring. MHFA training equips individuals to recognise signs of poor mental health, have the confidence to start vital conversations and signpost individuals to support. We know how important it is for people to feel confident, be able to provide a listening ear and know how to support friends, family members or peers. 100% of attendants who responded to our feedback survey in 2024 agreed that they knew how to recognise the signs of mental ill health in themselves or others, felt confident in approaching someone who may need support, and knew how and where to signpost others to mental health support. One attendee said: “I really enjoyed this course. It was so informative and gave so many tools to help support in the workplace and out of work. The trainer was amazing...” 

 “I really enjoyed this course. It was so informative and gave so many tools to help support in the workplace and out of work. The trainer was amazing...” 

However, MHFA training is only one part of an organisation’s wellbeing strategy. Equipping leaders and managers to do the same and actively make our work good for us is an important part of the equation. 

We’ll be announcing more on this later this year.  

Research

Having launched our new research grants programme in 2024, in January we awarded our first £15,000 Impact Grant to a research project seeking to develop a greater understanding of alcohol use behaviours and barriers to help seeking in the UK veterinary professions. Our second round of research grants will open in spring 2025.  

Each year there are two types of grants available: a £5,000 Discovery Grant, aimed at early career researchers, and a £15,000 Impact Grant. As no Discovery Grant was awarded in the first round of applications last year, funding for two Discovery Grants will now be available in the next round of applications in 2025. For more information and details on how to apply, please visit the Mind Matters website. 

Our focus on research and knowledge exchange into veterinary mental health continues into 2025, as this year we will be hosting our fifth biennial research symposium – “Advancing veterinary mental health research: learning from the past, considering the present, and looking to the future.” The one-day symposium will be held on 10 October at Eastside Rooms in Birmingham. If you’re interested in submitting a research abstract, or want to find out more, visit the symposium page on the Mind Matters website.