Dr Sara Rhys Jones: Why we’ve launched ACTivate Your Life, a Deaf Wellbeing online course (with BSL video)

We are excited to announce a free online BSL course with new ways of coping with everyday stress, anxiety and low mood. It can be found on YouTube at this link.

Watch a BSL introduction below:

DWB v 1 from Fiona Nicholson on Vimeo.

This course is called ACTivate Your Life: Deaf Wellbeing online course.

This course, delivered in BSL by Deaf presenters, helps us to learn how to look after ourselves, keep our minds and bodies well and how to carry on keeping healthy.

For everyone, life can be uncertain, with ups and downs. Sometimes we feel low, distressed or anxious and struggle to sleep. We often do not know how to look after ourselves and how to take good care of our mental health.

In comparison to hearing population, Deaf people are at least twice more likely to experience mental health problems including depression and anxiety (Kvam et al., 2007), and are more likely to have health difficulties (including physical) (Shields et al., 2020).

The reasons for higher levels of mental health problems including depression, anxiety, stress, inability to sleep well are often because of inaccessible health-related information, lack of awareness and support within the Deaf community and communication difficulties i.e. the fact that healthcare professionals are often unable to communicate directly with Deaf people (Young et al., 2017).

A Deaf person is also four times more likely to be unemployed than a hearing person, and those Deaf people without employment are more likely to have poorer mental well-being (Rogers et al., 2018).

The ideal treatment for Deaf people experiencing psychological distress would be direct counselling support from Deaf healthcare professionals without the need of using an interpreter because they are more likely to meet Deaf people/s’ cultural and linguistic needs.

However, this is not always easy to access (you can contact SignHealth or Deaf4Deaf if you would like to find out more about these services).

This is why we have made an ACTivate Your Life course specially for people who use BSL.

The course was created by a clinical psychologist, Dr Neil Frude, based in Cardiff, South Wales, to help people learn how improve their mental health and wellbeing. He wants this course to be accessible to everyone including Deaf people.

Neil did research in the UK on what helps people to cope with everyday anxieties and stress. He used this information from this research to create the course and it has been shown to be extremely helpful for many people. Some examples of the feedback from people who used the course:

“I feel this course has made a real difference to my life”

“The mindfulness exercises were so useful and easy to do”

“I can honestly say that the ACTivate Your Life course has changed my life. I am a different person and now much more able to cope with stress”

The course is split into 4 ACTS:

ACT 1: How your Mind works
ACT 2: Accept what you cannot change
ACT 3: Mindfulness
ACT 4: Your Values

A group of Deaf volunteers, including myself, worked closely with Neil to create a BSL version of the course. We, in the group, know what it is like to feel low, anxious, upset, stressed or unable to sleep and we want to share with the Deaf community information and tips on how to cope.

David Ellington, from a company called VS1 Productions, is the producer also one of the presenters. We started the filming of the online course in January 2020 and lockdown halted the filming in March 2020. It was not until the summer of 2021 that the filming could resume and we are now ready for launch!

Watch the Introduction to learn how to use the course and you also can see how the course was created by the short documentary, ‘Behind the Scenes’!

There will be a subtitled version of the course available on the websites too. We are grateful for the financial support for the filming of the course from British Society for Mental Health and Deafness and Public Health Wales. RNID are supportive of this project and kindly gave us use of their Cardiff offices for the filming of the course. We also thank BDA Cymru for their support of the project.

We hope this free online BSL course, will help Deaf people to look after their mental health, to understand themselves and their minds better; and improve their wellbeing.

Dr Sara Rhys Jones
Clinical Psychologist

Find the course on YouTube by clicking here.

Useful References:
Kvam, M. H., Loeb, M., & Tambs, K. (2007). Mental Health in Deaf Adults: Symptoms of Anxiety and Depression Among Hearing and Deaf Individuals. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 12(1), 1-7.
Rogers, K., Dodds, C., Campbell, M. & Young, A. (2018). The validation of the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (SWEMWBS) with Deaf British sign language users in the UK. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, 16:145.
Shields, G.E., Rogers, K.D., Young, A. et al. (2020). Health State Values of Deaf British Sign Language (BSL) Users in the UK: An Application of the BSL Version of the EQ-5D-5L. Appl Health Econ Health Policy 18, 547–556.