A new mental health campaign aimed at changing one million lives across the world by encouraging more people to talk about mental health has formally been launched globally by Jacobs And supported by Safer Highways.

The One Million Lives campaign was set up to promote positive mental health and wellbeing, provides a free mental health check-in tool that helps users assess their current state of mind and provide supportive suggestions for help and growth. As the title suggests, the aim is to make a difference to more than one million lives across the globe, not just for people working in the highways, transport and infrastructure sector, but to everyone.

The campaign’s vision is to start a movement that equips people with tools to understand and improve their mental health and to create ‘ripple effects’ to encourage friends, family and colleagues to do the same. It wants to encourage open conversations about mental health and to share knowledge on the subject to reduce stigma, creating a legacy-that people are excited and proud to be part of.

One Million Lives is the brainchild of Paul Hendry, Vice President of HSE at Jacobs, Peta Slocombe , a psychologist from Perth WA and a Jacobs team of wellbeing and mental health experts. The dream was to create something that would help people address their own mental health issues by providing something that was free and accessible to everyone.

The campaign was launched in the UK, alongside a video at the Safer Highways online Mental Health Summit. The animated video highlights the devastating fact that mental health problems across the world leads to over one million people ending their lives and 16 million more attempting to do so in some way. It says over half the population will experience a mental health disorder during their lifetime but only one in three people will get help. One Million Lives wants to start conversions that end the sigma around mental health and ‘Turn ripples of suffering into great waves of hope.”

The website and app offer people a mental health ‘check in’. Once they have finished, they then get access to a wealth of free resources to help them improve their life, which is designed around their tailored, personal report – which already in excess of 3,000 people have utilised – before its global launch.

Speaking as part of a article on the campaign in the latest edition of SH magazine, Mr Hendry said: “As an organisation we really wanted to give back in this way to both the industry we operate in but also society in general to give people the chance to do something like this, that they may never have had the chance to otherwise-that was the biggest single driver for One Million Lives,”

“We hope the ripple effect we are looking for really pushes this forward. It would have been much easier to do something within Jacobs. At a time like this, we wanted to hold hands with our competitors, our peers because together we can create a much bigger impact with this,” he explains. “The thing about this is that it will enable conversations around mental health to happen and the more people that talk the better. The One Million Lives website and app is the enabler to this being as successful as possible.”

Mr Hendry added: “We wanted something that focused on being preventative. To enable people to take control themselves. I felt that was missing from my experiences of different programmes that we had taken part with or knew about around the world. The ones were existed were good but tended to be reactive and I always felt there was something missing,”

Adding to Mr Hendry’s comments, Safer Highways CEO, Kevin Robinson said: “Support around mental health within the workplace has long been a challenge for employers large and small. The One Million Lives initiative and toolkit enables individuals to understand where they currently sit on the mental health equilibrium.

”This, alongside our own Thriving at Work survey, enables all of the good people we put to work on the public highways to have access to resources and action plans to make sure we are going home not just safe but also well on a daily basis.”

The One Million Lives survey is now live at www.oml.world whilst the results of the Safer Highways organisational survey can be found in the report here.