Over the past few months, we’ve been having honest conversations with people connected to mental health day support. People who use services, work in them, commission them, and care deeply about making them better. Lyn Griffiths, Development Lead, Equal Lives and Learning Disabilities, explores what it means to truly listen and how leading with empathy could shape the future of mental health day services.
Some of those conversations have been raw. Some hopeful. Most, both.
While the circumstances and stories vary, certain themes keep coming up across roles, across places, and across lived experience.
Here’s some of what’s stayed with us:
Support isn’t just about services, it’s about people feeling seen
People using day support often talked about what really matters to them:
“It’s not just about my mental health. It’s about my life.”
They spoke about needing freedom, purpose, connection, and stability. What helped most was often simple: a trusted relationship, a meaningful routine, the chance to spend time in nature or do something creative.
They didn’t want to be “done to”. They wanted to be known as people, not cases. They wanted their lives back, not just more services, rather support that helps them reconnect with everyday living.
Too often, help arrives too late
We heard again and again that people had to reach 'breaking point' before they were offered meaningful support.
“Unless you’re in full crisis, you don’t tick the right boxes.”
This threshold-driven approach doesn’t reflect how mental health works or how people recover. It creates barriers to prevention, and forces people to go without support until things are much harder to come back from.
A breathing space, not a destination
A recurring idea was that services should offer people a breather, not a trap. A space to pause, recover, and gather strength so they can return to life outside of services.
“I don’t want to stay forever. I just need somewhere to land when things get too much.”
Day support can be part of someone’s life without becoming their life. When it works well, it offers rhythm, reassurance, and a bridge back to the things that give life meaning: relationships, routines, creativity, even boredom.
Relationships matter, and they take time
A striking theme was the importance of consistency. Not having to re-explain your story. Not losing key workers. Not being moved between disconnected services.
“Just one person who gets it, who sticks around; that would change everything.”
For many, the ideal support wasn’t a programme or building. It was a relationship. Someone who walked alongside them without judgment or constant turnover. This came through most strongly in calls for peer support; not as a bolt-on, but as core to good care.
Staff and professionals feel the same pressures, but have little space to reflect
In parallel, sessions with staff, managers, and commissioners, revealed another truth: those delivering support are stretched, too, and, often working in isolation.
Many professionals told us they had little time to connect with each other or reflect on what’s working.
“We’re so busy keeping things going, we never get time to step back and ask: is this actually helping?”
Some hadn’t met with colleagues across roles for months or ever. The fragmentation people using services experience is often mirrored within and between teams themselves.
The system is full of care, as well as constraint
What we’re learning is that most people in this system, whether using it or working in it, care deeply. But they are often up against processes, policies, and funding structures that make that care hard to sustain.
There is no lack of insight. People know what would help.
What’s missing is the space to talk about it together, and the permission to act differently.
Support should lead back to life, not just back to services
At its best, day support offers a breathing space. A hand on your shoulder. A place to catch your breath.
It doesn’t replace life in the community; it reconnects you to it.
It doesn’t fix everything, but it reminds you that you’re not alone.
It helps people live, not just cope. And it recognises that mental health isn’t a fixed state, it’s part of being human.
We’ll keep listening, and we’ll keep sharing what we hear. Not because people haven’t said it before, but because they deserve to be heard and because what they’re telling us still isn’t built into the way support is designed.
We’ll also be continuing these conversations in the months ahead, with people involved in day support of all kinds. Because the more we listen across roles, across experiences, the clearer it becomes:
Good support isn’t about services. It’s about people, place, and the freedom to live a life that feels like your own.
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Lyn Griffiths, Development Lead, Equal Lives and Learning Disabilities, explores what it means to truly listen and how leading with empathy could shape the future of mental health day services.
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