Meet the Chamber Member: A Q&A with Meera Phull from Brighter Minds

One of the best things about our Chamber member community is that we bring together local business people from a wide range of sectors and sizes, making their success stories all the more varied and interesting.  

To learn more about the people behind the businesses, we’ve started running interviews with different Chamber Members. Most recently, we spoke to Meera Phull, who is the Director of Brighter Minds, a mental health service, to find out more about her company and how she gets involved in the Chamber community. 

Can you introduce yourself and tell me about Brighter Minds? 

Hi, I'm Meera Phull, and I'm the director of Brighter Minds. Brighter Minds is a mental health service set up and run in Bristol by myself. I've set up Brighter Minds having worked in mental health my whole adult life and feeling like we're missing a bit of a trick in our approach to mental health, in that we tend to focus on treating mental health problems, but there's another side of that around promoting mental health and wellbeing and doing what we can to try and prevent mental health difficulties from emerging and developing in first place. 

So Brighter Minds is around empowering people to improve their mental health and wellbeing, and we do this through three different streams. The first one is individual-based cognitive behavioural therapy, the second one is around mental health and wellbeing education and promotion, and then the third stream is around promoting mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. 

Can you tell me about the mental health support that you offer in the workplace? 

Mental health support in the workplace is something I'm really passionate about. Most of us work, we spend a lot of time at work, and I think if we can feel our best at work we can give our best, and if we feel like we're able to give our best, we gain a sense of satisfaction. It feels like a really important area to focus on.  

So over the course of my career, I've worked in lots of different settings. I've worked in the NHS, the private sector, for mental health, corporate settings, I've held global roles, university kind of settings. So having worked across lots of different sectors, sometimes being the only mental health professional either in a team or an entire business, I've seen and experienced some of the challenges with mental health at work.  

What I've taken away is that most businesses want to look after their people, but don't always know how. We don't know what we don't know, and I like to think that's where I come in as a mental health professional to offer some guidance on what are some of the key challenges that you're facing, and what are some really practical things that we can do to try and address those challenges.  

Why is it important for businesses to focus on employee’s mental health in the workplace? 

We spend a huge amount of time at work, and most of us want to go into work and feel like we're doing a good job, we're contributing, and have that sense of achievement from what we're doing, and we can't do that if we're not feeling our best.  

The stats suggest that one in four of us will be affected by mental health at some point in our lifetime. I think it's likely that that's under-reported because we don't all talk about our mental health. So it's a little bit of a no brainer, this is something that affects us all, so why would we not want to try and do something to get people feeling better and functioning as best they can so that we will feel good? 

Finally, why did you become a Chamber Member and what can you offer other members? 

I’ve been a Chamber Member for just over a year now. I essentially joined to gain a sense of community. It's been really nice to link in with other local businesses to find out about how people are getting on, what's going well, what are some of the challenges, and to be able to link in and support each other. I've managed to get involved with running some workshops so far, which has been really well received and really enjoyable and there a few more in the pipeline which is really exciting. 

Want to learn more about being a Chamber member? 

If you’re interested in becoming a Chamber Member, and want to learn more about the wide range of benefits, events and business support we offer, you can find out more here.  

We are a friendly team, so if you have any questions or simply prefer chatting over the phone, please give us a call on 01275 373 373, or fill in our enquiry form here.   

Want to learn more about Brighter Minds?

Visit the Brighter Minds website to find out more, and sign up to the Brighter Minds newsletter for their latest blogs, events and services.