New charity project driving mental health awareness in Scottish Highlands – as support services hit the road
A TEAM of mental health heroes are driving away stigma in the Scottish Highlands – by taking their support services on the road.
Mikeysline was set up in response to the rising number of suicides in the region in 2015 and has become a lifeline for people struggling with emotional issues.
The Inverness charity, which has a bee logo and holds support groups called Hives across the Highlands, recently converted a van so that its staff can reach those in far-flung areas.
The mobile Hive, the first of its kind in Scotland, was custom-built to provide a safe space for adults and young people to talk — and the organisation hopes it will encourage more to reach out.
Mikeysline CEO Emily Stokes said: “The Hive has dual roles. One is to raise awareness of us as a charity.
“We were born in Inverness and have been here eight years, but not everyone in the rural areas knows about us.
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“And that’s where mental health support is the most inaccessible. Our plan is to go as far as Orkney and we’ve already been to the likes of Fort William, Skye and Ullapool.
“It’s about raising awareness as much as it is providing support there and then.
“A lot of what we do is work on stigma; it’s higher in rural communities than anywhere else because people keep things in the family and don’t reach out for support.
“We encourage people to reach out, to know it’s OK not to be OK. Now we can reach more people with the mobile Hive.”
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The unit has been kitted out with a sofa and cushions to look like a living room.
The Wolfson Foundation provided funding for the vehicle and local business, Vulcan Van Conversions, helped bring the charity’s vision to life.
The project, which was dreamed up pre-Covid, took eight months to complete after getting the go-ahead last year.
Operations manager Brogan Bowie added: “Our core value is to be welcoming and have that cosy feel. We didn’t want it to be clinical or cold.
“There is a nature theme around nurturing your mind so we looked at green colours but still kept it relatively neutral.
“There are areas in the Highlands and Islands with no support and the stigma around mental health is completely different.
“Using the Hive, showing our logo and providing services is hopefully changing those views.
“If they only see the outside it looks like a normal van, but what’s amazed people is that you can convert it into something quite special.”
According to the latest stats, deaths recorded as “probable suicides” were higher in the Highlands, Western Isles and Orkney than the Scottish average.
This has been a consistent trend in the regions over recent years. It is one of the driving forces for professionals at Mikeysline to reach out to young people.
The charity provides a text service, school workshops and face-to-face opportunities at its Hives in Inverness, Nairn, Alness, Tain, Portmahomack and Balintore.
The next step is to expand services in Moray, where access to mental health support is limited.
Emily said: “We offer early intervention through to crisis support. On any day we might be supporting someone feeling lonely or isolated, right through to someone planning to take their life.
“We want to get to people as early as possible so they never feel that they have nowhere to go.”
Mikeysline hopes it will be able to purchase more mobile Hives in the future.
Emily added: “We’re not a funded charity so we got grants to buy and covert the van, and if we’re lucky enough to get that again, I could see us having another one in Moray.
“The perception is that mental health support is in the big cities and not rurally. People don’t want to be a burden. But nobody that reaches out to us is a burden, that’s why we are here.
“Everyone can struggle. People are used to not having immediate access to things and so the threshold is a lot higher before they ask for help and that can be quite dangerous
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“We’d have to get a lot more funding to have more mobile Hives, but that would be a dream situation because they are very effective.”
For more information go to mikeysline.co.uk.