Before I trained as a counsellor I had a lot of jobs. Royal Navy at seventeen. Fitting bathrooms. Maintenance for a property company. Driving lorries around Europe. Delivering pizzas, then running the shop. Driving buses for Go North East.
Across all of that, I can remember one piece of mental health provision. A number on a poster in a staff room. I never rang it. I don't know anyone who did.
I've thought about that poster a lot since. The point isn't that it was inadequate. The point is that it was there, it cost the company something, and it did nothing, because it was waiting to be approached by people who were never going to approach it.
That's still the shape of most workplace mental health support. An assistance programme renewed once a year with nobody checking the usage figures. A first aid course that gives someone a certificate and sends them back to their desk to work out on their own what to do about a colleague who's gone quiet. A wellbeing day, once, followed by nothing. All of it sits downstream and waits.
And all of it asks the person who is struggling most to do the hardest thing first, which is to notice what's happening to them, name it, decide they qualify, and put their hand up. The people who can do that are mostly going to be alright. The provision selects for them. Everyone else stays exactly where they were.
Underneath that is a bigger assumption which I think is simply wrong. These systems treat mental health as a condition sitting inside a person, which the organisation might reasonably help them manage, in the same spirit as offering a gym discount.
It isn't that. Mental health is a relationship with the world around you. And for most adults, work is a very large part of that world. It's where the hours go, where status comes from, where a good week or a bad one gets decided. A workplace is not a neutral bystander funding a helpline for people who get ill inside it. It's part of what shapes how people are. The workload, the manager, whether anybody notices when you go quiet, whether it feels possible to say you're struggling. That isn't the backdrop to somebody's mental health. It's part of the thing itself.
Once you take that seriously, offering the individual a helpline is a bit like treating someone for damp and never looking at the roof.
Being Seen Is Where It Begins
The Lighthouse Alliance is what I built in response.
It's a whole-organisation approach rather than a service you buy for individuals. It starts from four things we hold to be true. People arrive whole. Being seen is where it begins. Responsibility is shared. Culture follows philosophy, not policy. Everything else is built on top of those in order: culture, then clinical infrastructure, then trained people, then the wider community. Philosophy at the base, because an organisation that hasn't decided what it believes in will keep buying interventions that contradict it.
The part that changes something day to day is the Beacon. Not a counsellor doing therapy at work, and not a first aider with a badge and no support behind them. A member of staff, properly trained and properly supervised, who is reliably present on a schedule people come to know. Their job is to recognise, respond and refer. They hold no ongoing clinical risk and they are not a substitute for treatment. What they are is somebody who notices, before the person concerned has had to work out how to ask.
That's the whole move. It shifts the burden of noticing off the person who is struggling and onto the organisation.
It also means this doesn't compete with mental health first aid training. That training teaches individuals to spot the signs, and it does that well. We train people too, and some of what we cover looks similar on paper. The difference is what happens after the course. A qualification on its own ends the day it's awarded. Ours sits inside something that carries on. A defined role, ongoing supervision, a presence people can rely on, and reporting back into the organisation. Training is part of what we do. It was never going to be the whole of it.
I should say plainly that I sell this. I'd rather put that on the table than have it arrive as a comment underneath.
And I'd rather be honest about what it can't do. A company can build all of this in and someone will still have a genuinely hard year. That's not a failure of the framework, it's what being a person is like. What changes is whether they have to carry it entirely on their own, and whether the place they work has behaved consistently enough, for long enough, that they believe it when somebody finally does ask.
If you're responsible for people at work, it's worth asking a plainer question than most wellbeing reviews start with. That's not what do we offer? but, who would notice.
