I spent yesterday in Bristol at a conference run by Mind, the mental health charity. It was specifically aimed at reducing suicide among LGBT people. There were a lot of local activists there.

The morning session was basically talking heads, including a prerecorded video from Stephen Fry. My colleague, Berkeley Wilde, from The Diversity Trust got to do the local people bit. The headline speaker was a young lad called Owen Jones. He was very good, even if he did look to me like he ought to be in a boy band.

The main messages that came out of the morning were that LGBT people suffer mental health problems at a far greater rate than straight people; that bi and trans people have it worse that LG people; and that austerity measures are significantly reducing the amount of money available to tackle this. Not only that, but services to LGBT people (and other minority groups) are being reduced proportionately more than for other groups. The government apparently has a policy of “mainstreaming”, by which they mean closing down specialist services for minority groups and incorporating that coverage in general services, which then fail to provide the specialist treatment that minorities need, and may be actively hostile to them.

All of the big shots and much of the audience evaporated after lunch, but the best point of the day was made in the final session by Alessandro Storer, Mind’s Equality Improvement Manager. He noted that because LGBT people suffer mental health problems at a much higher level than the bulk of the population, they are actually a core constituency for mental health services. Dropping services for them, while keeping services for people who need them less, makes no sense.

Of course, as Berkeley never tires of saying, we need good academic studies to make this point. Thankfully a lot more work is being done in this area these days. I particularly recommend this study done by Scottish Trans in collaboration with Sheffield Hallam University.

One of the things I had been interested in was how inclusive the event would be. The speakers made an effort to mention bi and especially trans people, so the awareness was definitely there. However, the event was very white, and we didn’t get to an actual trans speaker until late in the afternoon. A brief shout out to my new pal Jacqui here, of whom more later, but the only speaker to get a standing ovation all day was Erica from Ystradgynlais Mind. Welsh trans girls FTW! What a shame half of the audience had gone by then.

For me the highlight of the day was the workshop on reducing stigma. It was run by a group called The Outsiders who specialize in human libraries and the like. You may remember that I did a human library thing last year.

The subject of the workshop was an idea called SoMe. That’s short for Social Media, but also works as a thing about identity. What happens is that you get a bunch of volunteers, each of whom produces a SoMe Profile about themselves. Attendees at the event can then choose to have a one-to-one chat with one of these people.

The idea here is to make a personal connection between the attendees and someone who represents the group whose social profile you are trying to improve. In our case that was people who had suffered mental health issues. The point of the SoMe profile is that, as an attendee, you can choose to talk to someone who sounds interesting to you, possibly someone with him you have a lot in common. That makes it much easier to get into a conversation with them, and to sympathize with them. I got to talk to Peter, who is autistic and a science fiction fan, and to Jacqui who is a young trans woman.

I must admit that the idea seemed a bit mad to be at first, but it worked really well. So well, in fact, that I want to talk to Berkeley about doing this sort of things as a trans awareness exercise in Bristol. Obviously we’d need a bunch of trans folk as volunteers, but that’s a good thing because the trans community is massively varied. I’m painfully aware that I’m something of a stereotype.

All in all, it was a good day, even if most of the messages coming out of it were somewhat negative. At least there were a lot of people there determined to do something about that. Also the chocolate brownies were superb.