Cheryl Hawkins
Project: Encourage Mental Health
Location: Leicester, Leicestershire
About Me
Hi, I’m Cheryl and I have a passion for mental health. I am a trained psychiatrist, but instead of seeing patients I now teach people about mental health. I train businesses, schools, and other organisations, but what I most enjoy is training churches in how to support people experiencing mental illness.
I became a Christian when I was 21 and currently attend an evangelical church. I am married and have two teenage children, a cat, and a dog. Our family also foster, and I am involved in supporting Home for Good, a Christian charity which promotes fostering and adoption.
About My Project
Encourage Mental Health helps churches to understand and respond to the needs of people experiencing poor mental health. Our training is practical and Bible based, addressing the specific concerns, challenges, and strengths that churches have when supporting someone living with mental illness. We build your confidence in having conversations around difficult topics, and we provide a structure to enable you to encourage and support the individual and their family when they are going through hard times.
Our Whole Church Awareness days can be delivered at your church so that the whole congregation can get involved in thinking through how you can be a community that is welcoming and loving towards those who might be struggling with their mental health. We can also deliver this training online if that works better for you.
We also have online training that can be worked through at your own pace. This training looks at many different aspects of mental health in more detail than our awareness days and is for those that are working directly with people who might be struggling with their mental health.
If your church is thinking about how it can support people with their mental health, contact us to discuss how we can help you, or have a look at our website www.encouragementalhealth.org.