Join us in Oxford on June 25th to meet Peter Leonard, Chief Executive of The Centre for Emotional Health, who will be helping us all to create emotionally healthy spaces for children and young people.
Warm up for the conference by listening to his podcast ‘Emotionally Speaking’, which features famous guests including broadcaster Kate Garraway, agony aunt Virginia Ironside, activist Satish Kumar and celebrity chef Alisdair Gill. Peter’s emotional intelligence guides him through these intimate conversations as his guests reveal the tough life events they have faced, and and share their coping mechanisms for emotionally challenging experiences including anxiety, loneliness, addiction and fatigue.
Peter is joined by our other keynote speakers…
Artist, mental health researcher and founder of the S.M.I.L.E-ing Boys Project, Kay Rufai, who will be exploring how art creates safe spaces with and for black boys in the education, mental health and criminal justice systems. Mina Fazel, Professor of Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Oxford shares how she bridges the gap between research and real-world impact to ensure effective interventions reach those in need.
Kadra Abdinasir, leads policy and influencing work at The Centre for Mental Health which tackles mental health inequalities. She will be sharing insights from its #FundTheHubs campaign calling for the national roll out of early support hubs that give young people a place to go when they first struggle with their mental health. Kadra will outline how the next government can tackle mental health inequalities to ensure all young people benefit from high-quality community based support.
Mina Fazel is Professor of Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Oxford and a consultant psychiatrist at the Oxford Children’s Hospital. Her main interest is in improving mental health services for vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations, which has led to an interest in refugee health and school-based mental health services. She conducts the OxWell Student Survey which in 2023 had responses from over 40,000 students from 200 schools and is guiding understanding of what school-aged students want and need. Mina will be sharing findings on exposures to self-harm material on social media. She will describe what these might be telling us about young people, their mental health, self-harm behaviour and other relevant school and home experiences. The implications of these findings will also be explored with a young people’s panel.