Do you have experience of mental health issues and live in Edinburgh?

Do you want to:

• Have your say about information and services for people with experience of mental health issues?

• Try to make changes in the way you are treated or the services that you receive?

• Then get involved in this collective advocacy project!

About the Edinburgh collective advocacy project

CAPS provides collective advocacy opportunities for people who live in Edinburgh and who have experience of mental health issues. The Mental Health (Care and Treatment) Act 2003 gives people the right to access Independent Advocacy.

Our purpose is to bring together groups of individuals with a common cause to raise awareness, campaign and influence service planning and provision. The group comes together to talk about mental health services and other issues that are important to them.

Read the announcement of the launch of this work.

Some of the topics Edinburgh Collective Advocacy is addressing now include: 

• Community Drop-In Services in Edinburgh. Drop-ins are free or donation-based events in the community, that do not require booking. They often run on a regular basis, with a focused activity or purpose, e.g. a coffee morning or a crafts session. The Community Voices group agreed that there are not enough drop-ins and community spaces in Edinburgh, and that they wanted to hear from people in Edinburgh about the drop-ins that are available. We are currently running a survey on this. Find out more about this here.

• Care Reviews in Edinburgh. People told us they had issues with how reviews of their care were conducted, and how this was communicated to them. Edinburgh Collective Advocacy met with people with lived experience and decision makers to address this. A summary of this meeting can be found here. Further work with group members on this is ongoing. 

• Savings and Strategic Planning in Public Services. People with lived experience have told us that they want to be more involved in decision making on this topic, and would like to do so through collective advocacy. Edinburgh Collective Advocacy have already given collective responses to some draft strategic plans on public services in Edinburgh, and our workers regularly attend strategic planning meetings to advocate for what people have asked them to share. 

• People have told us their mental health has been impacted by the Infected Blood Scandal, so we are doing some further work on this topic. 

Why get involved?

Collective advocacy enables a peer group of people, as well as a wider community with shared interests, to represent their views, preferences and experiences.

Scottish Independent Advocacy Alliance

The benefits of Collective advocacy include:

• Reducing feelings of isolation when raising a difficult issue
• Providing a stronger collective voice which is more difficult to ignore.
• Sharing your experiences and opinions helping you to have your voice heard.
• Building skills and understanding your rights.
• Meeting likeminded people

We are always interested in other potential collective advocacy issues that could be part of ongoing work. Edinburgh Collective Advocacy workers are available to talk to people about how the project works and how they might like to be involved.  

If you, or a group you go to, would like to be involved please come along to one of the welcome sessions or fill in the Get Involved form below, selecting the Edinburgh collective advocacy option and Angharad will get in touch with you.

(If you would like mental health information related to Edinburgh you can find it on the iThrive website).

View all our collective advocacy projects