Thirty-year-old Jolel Miah from Luton is organising the first Our Minds Matter Conference on Thursday 16 February. The theme is: Faith and Culture: Breaking the Stigma of Mental Health in Luton.

“We want to show how we can use faith and culture to enhance mental health and prevent mental illness from occurring in the first place through education and working directly with communities. Prevention is the long term intervention,” said Jolel.

The conference will explore how faith can support mental wellbeing, how the stigma around mental health can be broken across different cultures and how students from diverse cultures and faiths can be supported to safeguard their mental wellbeing.

Guests will also get the chance to hear from a service user who suffered from a mental health illness and find out how her culture and faith contributed to her recovery. The University’s Vice Chancellor Bill Rammell and the Mayor of Luton, Councillor Tahir Khan, will speak at the conference.

As well as studying for his PhD into behaviour change interventions, Jolel runs Our Minds Matter, a charity that focuses on promoting mental health in the diverse communities of Luton.

“The services are there but often people suffer in silence because they don’t know who to turn to, or they fear they might be misunderstood if they speak up. Our Minds Matter have developed a strategy with partners in the town to help bridge the gap between the services and the diverse communities of Luton, people have suffered long enough for us do nothing,” said Jolel.

“Every society has systems whether this is in our homes, workplaces, schools, colleges,  public services such as hospitals, GP practices, police and the better we understand mental health, our society will flourish. At the conference we will have series of lectures and workshops to demonstrate how we can achieve this.”

The conference is open to all and tickets are available here.