Your Stories is a platform to share lived experience and personal stories on mental health and illness.
By contributing to the ‘Your Stories’ blog at Bath Mind, you can share your own lived experience whilst spreading awareness about mental health and mental illness. Speaking about mental health can be a powerful tool in changing people’s perspective.
Below, you’ll see some guidelines to help you in writing your Bath Mind blog.
We’re very flexible in what your blog looks like! To give you some guidance, we’ve listed some formats and word count aims below.
Format examples include:
You can aim for your blog to be anywhere between 300 and 900 words in length. You can also choose a photograph to sit alongside your story, however this is entirely optional.
We’ll publish blogs/pieces that:
If you are interested in sharing your story for Bath Mind but worried about online safety – please let us know. We take the safety of our Your Stories bloggers very seriously.
You don’t have to use your real name if you don’t want to. We understand some people haven’t told their friends, family or employer about any struggles they have with their mental health, and aren’t yet ready to.
You’re welcome to use a pseudonym if you wish or post anonymously – just let us know when you email in your interest.
Please do not include anything that relates to your private information in your blog, like address or specific residency.
Some themes to think about:
If you’re interested in writing a blog, please send us a brief overview of what is it you’d like to write. This could briefly describe any events or moments you’d like to write about, your feelings, changes in your life or tips you’d like to share (around 100 to 200 words).
Email us to submit your blog proposal
We may edit your blog for clarity or to remove triggering content, but we will always share any edits with you before we publish. Please note that it may take a few weeks to publish the blog online due to limited staff capacity. We will contact each Your Stories writer when their piece is live.
We welcome all who are looking to share their experience with mental health and wellbeing. We particularly welcome submissions from those in Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities, as well as LGBTQ+ communities, as published stories on lived experience and mental health from such communities are generally under-represented throughout the mental health sector.
These guidelines were created by utilising best practice used by Mind and Time to Change.