As Team GB continues to win an incredible haul of medals at the Paris Olympics, (not least in the equestrian disciplines!) Stable Life reflects on how sport can help those struggling with their mental health
As we watch so many of Team GB winning medals in Paris, from Tom Daley to Adam Peaty to Tom McEwen, Ros Canter, and Laura Collett, and Ben Maher, Scott Brash and Harry Charles, we all feel justifiably proud of all these talented individuals, and the teams behind them, who made these brilliant results possible.
Here at Stable Life we salute each and every one of Team GB, and it’s been a joy to see how much the participants, from Bryony Page to Bethany Shriever, just obviously love what they do. And now is also a great time to reflect on just how much sport can have a positive influence on people’s lives.
Back in 2020, along with seven other Sport for Change organisations, Stable Life was successful in securing funding for five years to deliver our Healing Hooves project through Comic Relief’s Ahead of the Game UK programme. The focus was improving mental health outcomes through combining sport based approaches and quality mental health support.
The Healing Hooves project sees Stable Life working in partnership with Inspire Youth and G10 Sports to deliver a programme focused on holistic well-being for young people in the Scottish Borders who experience poor mental health. We use a combination of equine facilitated wellness, horse riding, psychotherapy and fitness to build mental wellness, resilience, core strength, social skills and confidence in our young people.
Over the last four years, we have been proud to work alongside the seven other organisations involved in the project, as well as a specialist sport and social impact consultancy, to help us to pool together our experiences, challenges, frustrations and findings, which have now been collated and published into the Ahead of the Game UK Learning Report which came out in 2023, and is designed to support organisations keen to build more intentional mental health support into their sport for change programmes.
The report produced a number of key findings which could be valuable to any organisation working in mental health:
Sport can build community instead of dependency and tackle underlying causes of social exclusion and isolation by building safe and diverse networks of support.
Sport interventions create different and often more familiar, safer cultural contexts which can mitigate the barriers to entry associated with mental health. Sport can therefore become an important entry point for a more specialist support.
Sport can focus on building positive mental health and habits, instead of tackling negative mental health. In cases where there is a clear and substantial diagnosis, it can still create environments where that stigma is minimised.
There were also some very interesting findings from the point of view of the organisations taking part, around the challenges of delivering programmes which really work for the participants. Four recommendations which came out of the work were:
Mental health and wellbeing should not be viewed in isolation: often the cause of poor mental health is societal, e.g. structural inequalities and social isolation. This is how people experience their mental health, and so it needs to be acknowledged and tackled within the societal context in which it emerges, rather than parcelled up as some individual deficiency.
This can be challenging, because sport-for-change programmes that seek to improve mental health are working within a system that often treat individuals in isolation. For example, funded partners observed that some existing frameworks for mental health treatment did not work and should be challenged – there are insights and perspectives that sport people can offer that show that clinical approaches are not always working.
Understanding these complex dynamics is crucial to developing effective sport interventions that are culturally sensitive, inclusive, and accessible.
This should be reflected in staff training and appointment. Programmes should be run by staff who understand the challenges faced by participants, either by lived experience or clearly acquired cultural competencies. Having staff who reflect the community and have “expertise by experience” was considered an important asset.
Toolkit
A toolkit has also been developed to provide some practical tips and recommendations for organisations to enable them to move toward an intentional approach that designs for mental health and wellbeing and achieves concrete outcomes that can be measured. The toolkit highlights the following requirements:
• The need for a compassionate and inclusive approach to mental health and wellbeing
• The need for successful partnerships and referrals
• The need for sustainable engagement and impact
The toolkit also recommends a series of steps which include planning, developing a theory of change and collaborating with the right people and organisations – partnerships are crucial. The document also points out that safety is paramount, as individuals may not have had positive interactions with various services in the past, so developing a space where people feel safe is essential to mental health provision which works.
Authors Alison Carney and Kat Craig also say that continual reflection and ongoing learning are essential to developing a successful programme, both for participants and for the staff and volunteers within the project. Measuring outcomes or progress is an important way of tracking how the programme is delivering outcomes for individuals, and the toolkit has a wealth of examples from different organisations of the various ways this can be carried out.
All of this makes sense to us here at Stable Life: we recognise some of these challenges and have been pleased to absorb the learnings from other organisations we have been working with on the Ahead of the Game project. The main takeaway, overall, has been how powerfully sport can instigate positive change within individuals – this is something we see regularly in our project and the reason we’re here doing what we do.
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