Mental health & wellbeing
Promoting and supporting good mental health and wellbeing are a priority for AMI. Explore information to help you understand mental health and the resources available.
Headspace - Mindfulness and Wellbeing App
Headspace provide mindfulness tools for everyday life, including meditations, sleepcasts, mindful movement and focus exercises. All AMI members get free unlimited access!
Mindfulness has been shown to help people stress less, increase focus, and sleep more soundly. Meditation helps you to be more mindful — and Headspace is your personal guide, with hundreds of meditations and exercises for sleep, focus, and movement.
To find out a bit more about Headspace or claim your free access, click here!
Wellbeing Self-Assessment Tool
In order to maintain a good level of personal wellbeing it can be helpful to spend a few minutes reflecting on how we are feeling, both physically and mentally.
The wellbeing self-assessment tool has been designed to help you understand and identify what may be causing you stress. The tool also suggests some different ways to help improve your overall wellbeing.
Give it a go today - it only takes 5 minutes!
For more information visit the St John Ambulance website here.
Mental Health First Aid Champions
There are plenty of different types of support out there and your AMI Mental Health First Aid Champions can help you access them. Your Mental Health First Aid Champions are a point of contact if you, or someone you are concerned about, are experiencing a mental health issue or emotional distress. They are not therapists or psychiatrists but can give you initial support and signpost you to appropriate help if required.
AMI Mental Health First Aid Champions
Lucy Harper
Lucy Harper
After completing a BSc in Medical Biochemistry at Birmingham University, Lucy worked in hospital laboratories and university departments across the West Midlands. In 2003 she completed a PhD entitled: "Renal Dopamine and Salt-Sensitive Hypertension" and continued her research career, completing several postdoc projects. During this time, Lucy also taught molecular biology practical classes to final year BSc students and spent her spare time writing articles for various publications. Through this experience she decided that her passion for science came from talking about it rather than doing it. She was offered the honorary Editorship of The Microbiologist magazine and when her postdoc contract ended, she took the position of Communications Officer for Med-Vet-Net, the EU FP6 project on zoonotic disease. Lucy began working as Communications Officer for AMI in June 2006. Since then, she has developed AMI's Communications remit and in June 2009 she was promoted to Communications Manager. In 2010 Lucy was awarded a MBA with distinction, which she completed part-time at Aston University. After a period of maternity leave, Lucy returned to the Society as Deputy CEO, and was then appointed as Chief Executive in November 2014.
Lucy’s key achievements for the organisation since then:
• Strategy - defining the purpose of AMI including rebrand and name change
• Growth of reserves by 53% from 2014 to 2021
• Diversification of investments into ESG
• Strategic relocation to London and then remote working
• DE&I focus
• Growth of core team
Leading AMI through change to operations, governance, and strategy, Lucy takes a collaborative approach, listening to all stakeholders to ensure integrity and openness in communication and decision-making.- Twitter:
- @lucyharper
Lucky Cullen
Lucky Cullen
Lucky completed her undergraduate degree in Medical Biochemistry at Kingston University in 2014, where her passion for microbiology originated through summer research internships and a research scholarship funded by the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (BSAC). A recurring factor in all of her research was antimicrobial resistance including next generation sequencing techniques to identify antimicrobial resistance within the nasopharyngeal niche, Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilm formation and the bacterial profiling of mastitic cows. Lucky progressed onto a PhD at Kingston University, where she developed an experimental evolution tool to explore the phenotypic and genotypic mutational pathways underlying the emergence of antimicrobial resistance in Escherichia coli. During her PhD Lucky attended many ECS and AMI conferences, as well as events such as Parliamentary Links Day. Lucky presented her research at the ECS Research Symposium in 2016, and was given the opportunity to present at the AMI Antimicrobial Resistance Meeting. Lucky was then awarded the AMI (then SfAM) presidency fund to present at the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) conference in New Orleans.
- Twitter:
- @LuckyCullen
Nasmille Larke-Mejía
Nasmille Larke-Mejía
Nasmille is Postdoctoral Researcher at GROW Colombia working in the Agricultural Diversity Programme. She focuses on studying the microbial ecology of soils associated to different crops (sugarcane and coffee) and the Colombian Páramo environment. Nasmille is an Environmental Microbiologist, specialized in the use of cultivation-dependent and cultivation-independent methods to study the microbial ecology of microorganisms in the terrestrial environment. Nasmille finished her PhD in 2018 at the School of Environmental Sciences (ENV) at University of East Anglia (UEA) funded by a Colombian government (Colciencias) Scholarship. Under the supervision of Professor J Colin Murrell, Nasmille worked on characterizing soil and phyllosphere microorganisms that use isoprene as their sole source of C using techniques including stable isotope probing (SIP), amplicon sequencing and metagenome analysis. Previously, as part of the CIMIC lab at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, Nasmille isolated and studied ANFO-degrading bacteria from an open coal mine pit and their expression of nitrogen cycle genes in presence of the explosive.
- Twitter:
- @wayuu_PhD
AMI Mental Health First Aid Champions can:
- Understand why mental health is as important as physical health
- Help build a mentally healthy workplace and understand how Mental Health First Aid fits into the workplace
- Recognise the main symptoms of mental health conditions
- Listen non-judgementally
- Provide Mental Health First Aid for the most common mental health conditions
- Guide a person towards appropriate professional support
Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) England provides a selection of free downloadable resources including interactive toolkits, strategic guidance and more. For further information visit the MHFA England website here.