Frequently Asked Questions

  • I would like to get involved and help fight mental health discrimination.  How can I do this?
    There are many different ways that you can get involved, whether you have experience of mental health problems or not.  Read our Get Involved section to find out more.
  • Where can I find out what is going on in my area?
    We have activities all over England.  Search for events and opportunities near you here.
  • Is funding available for other projects to become part of Time to Change?
    Unfortunately, all of our funding has been allocated and so we are not able to fund any further projects. However, through our Open Up project, we will be offering support to individuals and groups with experience of mental health problems who have ideas for innovative ways to challenge discrimination. Find out more about Open Up here.
  • How are people affected by mental health problems involved in Time to Change?
    It’s important to us that people with experience of mental health problems are involved in every aspect of our work – from planning our projects to carrying them out and evaluating them. 

    The strategy behind Time to Change was based on extensive         consultation with people with mental health problems and their carers. We also consulted service users and carers in the planning of the anti-stigma campaign, to help us identify who we should target with the campaign and what its messages should be.  Read more about this work.

    An integral part of Time to Change is the Lived Experience Advisory Panel, a panel of 12 people affected by mental health problems who advise on all aspects of the programme and help to ensure that service users are involved in all of our projects.

    There are many other ways in which service users are involved and can get involved in Time to Change: delivering training, telling their stories and running projects within Open Up to challenge discrimination on a local level. People with mental health problems are also helping to monitor and evaluate our work.

    Find out more about how people with mental health problems can get involved.

  • Is Time to Change government funded?
    Time to Change is not funded by the government and is an independent voluntary-sector led programme.  However, we are working closely with the Department of Health as we want to work in partnership across all sectors, including the statutory sector.
  • Is Time to Change providing training in schools?
    Our current focus is on working with adults, so it is not in our remit to work with schools.  However our Education Not Discrimination project works with teacher training colleges to provide targeted training about mental health to trainee teachers. 
  • Is Time to Change working with the media?
    We are using the media to get our messages across to the public through PR and advertising, and we want to work with the media to deliver the campaign. However, we are not specifically targeting journalists as an audience for any aspect of the campaign. 

    The Department of Health’s anti-stigma programme, Shift, has a training programme for journalists to help improve the way mental health issues are reported in the media. This is an important area of anti-discrimination work, but we don’t want to duplicate work that is happening elsewhere so we are focusing on different audiences, where anti-discrimination work is not already being carried out. Evidence also suggests that by improving wider public attitudes towards mental health, we can help shape a society where negative portrayals of mental health issues in the media become unacceptable.

  • Is Time to Change campaigning to improve services within the NHS?
    No, because our focus is on reaching beyond the mental health sector to engage the public and change attitudes and behaviours around mental health rather than services themselves.  However we are working with service providers and organisations that represent them, such as the NHS Confederation.