Protect the Mind: A new mental health initiative

Animal activists face huge pressures. Protect the Wild wants to offer support.

Protect the Wild has always been incredibly proud to help support monitor and sab groups with equipment and to give these courageous and dedicated frontline animal activists a platform to promote their work. But for some time it’s felt to us like that’s only half the story: what could we be doing to help support the individuals themselves?

From feeling overwhelmed by the things we see or read about to standing up against bullies and thugs, all of us working to protect animals face enormous pressures every day. If we’re lucky we have a trusted circle we can confide in, but sometimes even family members may not understand (or are fed up with hearing about hunts or shoots or harm or wildlife crime). Stresses and strains get bottled up until we can no longer function properly, but we often pile more pressure on ourselves thinking ‘I don’t do enough’ or that if we stop we are letting others - animals included - down.

We are deeply caring people, and empathy and compassion are ways of life. It’s all too easy to lose ‘balance’ in our lives, for our work to become all-consuming. We may recognise just how bad we’re feeling, but many of us are also anxious not to appear ‘weak’ so we just keep going. In truth, the one thing we often don’t take care of enough is ourselves. How do we know this? Because every one of us at Protect the Wild has felt exactly the same way at some point…

Dr. Ishani Rao: helping activists “find the balance we all need”

So what can Protect the Wild do about it? Let’s start by saying that there is plenty of ‘wellbeing’ information online. Much of it is useful and helpful. We are in no way suggesting that we are stepping into a breach where no one has stepped before - but when we looked around we didn’t feel that information was always aimed at people like us and the people we work with: front-line monitors and sabs, rescuers, writers and creators who are constantly thinking about and trying to protect wildlife.

We did (briefly) consider creating material ourselves, but as well-meaning as we might be when it comes to mental health we aren’t remotely qualified to write about anything more than our own experiences. And we are certainly not in a position to start offering advice to anyone else. That would be irresponsible and potentially damaging. No, what we really needed to do was find someone who is!

With impeccable timing, a few months back Rob (Pownall, our CEO) was at a vegan conference where a seminar on mental health was held. It was hosted by Dr. Ishani Rao, an NHS GP and urgent care doctor specialising in climate change, plant-based lifestyle medicine and mental health. Ishani achieved her medical degree and BSc in Women’s Health from King’s College London and is currently taking a Masters in global health policy with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Ishani says that her passions are animal rights, activists’ mental health, and protecting the environment.

Rob came away extremely impressed. He contacted Ishani a few days later, outlining what we were thinking of doing and asking her if she’d like to be involved. We’re extremely grateful that she immediately saw the potential, understood exactly what we hoped to do, and jumped straight in!

We are now able to announce a new Protect the Wild initiative with Dr Ishani Rao to help support the mental health of animal activists: Protect the Mind.

“Activism is my rent for living on the planet”

Ishani has a hugely infectious enthusiasm and seemingly boundless energy! She has already been hard at work on all our behalves. Over the last few weeks Ishani has recorded four fifteen-minute videos which are available on the Protect the Wild website on a new Protect the Mind page.

The four videos cover:

• Burnout Prevention

• Trauma Management

• Staying Motivated

• Managing Tension

All four are packed with tips and guidance and delivered in a friendly and extremely relatable way. In the videos, Ishani shares some external resources that she recommends, and we have added those to the Protect the Mind page as well.

But recognising the problems we face is just a start. Videos and linked resources are necessarily general and broad-brush. Neither Protect the Wild nor Ishani would claim for a moment that they address individual problems. So, what we hope to do next - assuming there is a demand - is to make things a little more ‘personal’ with live, interactive online workshops. An extension of that ‘circle of friends’ we referred to earlier, in effect.

At the moment we haven’t fully landed on the topics we’ll cover, but Ishani is very keen to host them and we are very keen to help set them up. We envisage a sort of ‘judgement-free safe space’ where we can all talk openly. Sharing experiences, and hopefully finding solutions. Supporting each other.

Protect the Wild will of course cover the costs of these workshops. There will be no requirement to ‘join’ anything, and we are working on using platforms that will ensure anonymity. No one will be put in the spotlight and no one will be expected to ‘join in’.

As we wrote above, these workshops are dependent on demand. So please watch this space for details…

After that?

Protect the Wild is not in a position to set up and run a full-on qualified counselling service of course. The support that we can offer is a starting place, a bridge towards getting help. Dr Rao is a GP with a special interest in this field, and as she says towards the end of her intro video if after we run the workshops anyone would like to talk to her (or another counsellor) one-on-one that can be arranged too.

Much as we would like to equip every group in the UK with every piece of kit they need, we really can’t. We do what we can to the limit of our resources and always will. In the same way, while we would like to wrap our arms around every suffering activist, we can’t realistically do that either. But with Dr Rao’s support, we plan on helping finance several of these individual sessions if the need arises.

We will post more information as Protect the Mind develops, but we want you to know that we are 100% committed to this initiative and we will do everything we can to support activists as much as possible. As Ishani says, “This is something I really care about” - and so do we.

• What do you think about this initiative? Let us know in the comments. Please note that Protect the Wild is not a counselling service and we can not answer queries about mental health issues ourselves. Always seek the advice of a qualified Mental Health Provider regarding any questions you may have about your specific mental health concerns.