It's LifeSIGNS, only faster

The home page of the LifeSIGNS website is a bit busy I admit; there's a lot going on and I sometimes wish it was a bit less complex; but then, there's so much on offer!

Anyway, while I haven't simplified our homepage yet, I have made it load faster for you! It now displays in your browser in half the time, yep, it's 50% faster now thanks to some streamlining I've done.

Hope you like the new faster us!

Also, here's a little graphic that shows the main areas of our home page.

Training in Wolverhampton

Yesterday I travelled to Wolverhampton to deliver self-injury awareness training to Spurgeons, who provide child care and support to families.

It seems that demand for LifeSIGNS SI Awareness Training is at an all time high, and I'm so pleased that our training can be used by so many different kinds of organisations across the country. We hope to double the amount of training we provide over the next year or so, and we're recruiting three new volunteer Trainers, so please contact us if you feel you could work with us as a trainer.

Thanks to Spurgeons for making me feel welcome.

Training Youths for Christ

I travelled to Stoke on Trent to deliver our Self Injury Awareness training to Youths for Christ facilitators and colleagues. They appreciated the LifeSIGNS training and requested hundreds more of our leaflet to use at the local music festival, Passion 07.

It's always nice to be appreciated, and LifeSIGNS is delivering so much training up and down the UK these days that we're hoping to recruit 3 more trainers! Perhaps you could join us?

Are you Mad for Music?

Following the great success of the ‘Mad for Arts’ and ‘Mad for Poetry’ series of films in 2004 and 2005, Media Trust Productions has been asked to make five more short films for Channel Five and the Community Channel.

The three-minute films will be shown every evening on five and Community Channel during the week of World Mental Health Day (October 10th 2007) and are funded by five and the Arts Council.

This year’s theme is ‘Mad for Music’ and we are looking for people with experience of Mental Health issues to collaborate with us.

We are seeking men and women of all ages and backgrounds and a broad range of music. If you have a story to tell about one particular piece of music or song please let us know. It may be that it has helped you cope with your condition or it may reflect your experience in some way. It may make you sad, happy, calm or even angry or it may be the piece of music that reminds you of a particular incident in your life.

Although you may play or write music yourself, the musicians or artists you choose should be well known to the general public. We hope the series will contribute to promote the diversity, visibility and credibility of people with experience of mental distress by allowing them to give their perspective on a universally shared experience such as music.

If you are interested in taking part, email Magali at: magalim@mediatrust.org with a few sentences explaining why a particular piece of music or song was important to you during your experience of a mental health issue.

You can watch some of the ‘Mad for Arts’ films on our website: www.madforarts.org


Magali Moreau

Assistant Producer
Media Trust Productions
3-7 Euston Centre
Regent’s Place
London
NW1 3JG
020 7874 7640
07717 855 743

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And if you are a talented musician, LifeSIGNS is seeking royalty-free music tracks, in MP3 format. Basically, can you let LifeSIGNS and our members use one of your compositions?

Email Wedge@lifesigns.org.uk if you'd like to share!

Come work with LifeSIGNS: Trainers Required

Providing Self-Injury Awareness Training is an important way of helping to change society’s assumptions about self-injury / self-harm and to improve the support available to people who self-injure. LifeSIGNS has been a leading provider of self-injury awareness training across the UK for many years, influencing the work of groups including doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals, medical and nursing students, schools, universities, care homes, and charities, just to name a few.

LifeSIGNS is seeking to recruit three new Self-Injury Awareness Trainers so as to keep up with the increasing demand for training about self-injury.

We pride ourselves in delivering Self-Injury Awareness Training from a personal point of view – we’re more interested in discussing the emotional background to self-injury than we are in statistics and scientific descriptions – so you don’t need to be an expert on the issue, but personal experience of self-injury is needed.

It’s a big job, standing in front of a room of people and talking about self-injury – even talking about your own personal experiences – but it’s extremely rewarding to play such an active role in changing people’s attitudes. We will work with you to train you how to deliver our Self-Injury Awareness Training, and work with you to ensure that you’re comfortable and confident in delivering training and answering difficult questions.

LifeSIGNS is run entirely by volunteers, and so we’re asking you to join us as an unpaid volunteer. Your travel expenses will be covered.

If you’re over 18 and are ready to change the world, please download our application and send it to Nick@lifesigns.org.uk

Trainer Application From (Word; 30KB); Right-Click and save to your desktop. Then change the filename to your name.

Interviews will then be conducted in Birmingham and London during June / July. Applicants are welcome from all over the UK as training will be needed all over the UK.

Applicants should be:

• Over 18. LifeSIGNS is a young organisation but we cover all age groups, from 13 to 100.
• Confident and articulate. A certain level of ‘life confidence’ is needed to organise a training session and to talk about self-injury in an open and thorough way.
• Approachable, friendly, and professional. Our trainers are the public faces of LifeSIGNS so it’s very important that you are able to make a good impression of the organisation with trainees.
• Aware of LifeSIGNS’ work and publications. Knowledge about our services and how we talk about things is crucial, but we provide you with all the additional training you need.
• Able to travel, either by car or trains and taxis. Travel Expenses will be covered.
• Able to check emails on a regular basis and understand the importance of diary management / scheduling.

EveryClick Matters

Who would have thought that the Everyclick Search Engine could have raised so much money for LifeSIGNS? And it's all down to you for using it in your everyday web-life, thank you!

You can find the search function on the left-hand side of our home page, but it would be great if you could visit www.everyclick.com/uk/lifesigns and bookmark it so you can use it as frequently as you like; it's a great alternative to the usual search engines and it directly helps raise money for charities like LifeSIGNS.

To support LifeSIGNS, make sure you register on Everyclick as a supporter of LifeSIGNS, we currently have over 100 supporters who ahve helped raise hundreds of pounds for us, just by searching the web! Have a look at how much money has been raised for us, and Join as a supporter now.

School Nurse Training in Dorset

Last week I ventured down to the wilds of Dorset to do some training on self-injury with a team of school nurses.

Self-injury awareness in schools is something we're really drawing attention to at the moment, not least by publishing self-injury policy advice for schools on our website and offering self-injury awareness training for teachers.

This was the first time I've done training with health care professionals and it was a great experience! It was fantastic to meet a group of school nurses who were so keen to discuss the issue, and we had a really interesting discussion about their experiences of responding to self-injury in schools. I know some health care workers are often criticised for their response to self-injury, but this group of nurses were really well informed and on the ball! They seemed very keen to spread awareness of the issue further using LifeSIGNS web-resources, which was great to see!

Support for Friends and Family Members

LifeSIGNS has a history of offering fantastic information to people who need to know more about self-injury, and we are proud of the direct emotional support we offer people who self-injure / self-harm.

Our Message Board is an important offering from LifeSIGNS, and the Message Board Community are a wonderful bunch of people with personal experience of self-injury and recovery.

We are now expanding our Message Board community to include those who care for people who self-injure; we now have a specific forum within our Board for 'Friends and Family' members to express themselves and discuss their concerns, thoughts and experiences with self-injury / self-harm.

While LifeSIGNS and our Community Members can't give advice, our Message Board is a safe and moderated space where people can express themselves and listen to other people's experiences and ideas in a non-judgemental and non-directive environment.

Why don't we give advice? Because we can't possibly know what's perfect and relavent advise! Only the individual knows the full details, and has all the information needed to make change in their lives. We believe that giving advice actually dis-empowers people and is disrespectful of their ability to manage their own life.

What we do is offer support and a fresh perspective. We offer ideas and new concepts, we offer our own personal experiences to reflect on, and we allow people to have the space to work through their own ideas, telling the story and working their way to a solution. It’s more than ‘active listening’, it’s empathic involvement – our members can often understand from the inside as they have direct personal experience of relying on self-injury while needing to work, study, raise children, care for loved ones, navigate their relationships et cetera.


We hope that you can let parents, guardians, carers and friends of people who self-injure know that there is help out there, and that LifeSIGNS can offer not only downloads and information, but emotional support and fresh ideas.

www.lifesigns.org.uk