It Starts With You.

Together we will end mental health stigma and discrimination. To achieve this See Me has highlighted what we believe are the key priorities for the next Scottish Government:

• Tackling stigma and discrimination and addressing the barriers they create must be seen as essential to all action to improve mental health, enabling people who experience mental health problems to live full lives.
• To support a growing social movement, public health messaging, including campaigns like Clear Your Head, must:
  • Highlight what stigma and discrimination looks and feels like and empower people to challenge it
  • Encourage and equip people across Scotland to talk openly about their own and others’ mental health without fear.
• People with experience of mental health problems must be supported to actively participate in work to prevent mental health stigma and discrimination, including service design and delivery and decision making.
• National and local decision-makers must resource, design and implement policies, systems and services that take account of the needs of people with lived experience of mental health problems, and reduce mental health stigma and discrimination.
• Leaders in key public settings and organisations must create inclusive cultures and take action to tackle systemic mental health stigma and discrimination.
• Policymakers at local and national level must recognise the intersection between mental health and other aspects of identity such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability, and work to tackle mental health stigma and discrimination connected to protected and marginalised identities and communities.
• Action must be taken at all levels to identify and address the persistent health-related, social, educational, economic and cultural inequalities experienced by people with lived experience of mental health problems