This weekend, we’ll be at Pride Cymru‘s annual festival in Cardiff. Our team will be in the parade on Saturday, and also in the welfare tent across both days, offering support to anyone having a difficult time during the event, or who could use some signposting for future support.

It may seem obvious to some why a mental health charity is supporting Pride. We’d also like to believe that it’s obvious that support for the LGBTQ+ community is just the right thing to do. But at a time when our identities and beliefs are under a constant process of simplification and weaponisation by divisive rhetoric, these things may benefit from being restated clearly and out loud.

So here it is: Platfform stands with the LGBTQ+ community, including trans people, and we believe that doing so is fundamental to the mission of any charity that aims to uphold mental health and social justice.

Belonging is a mental health intervention

We’ve spoken a fair bit about the importance of community, connection and belonging to mental health, and that our mental health as a nation is a collective, shared thing. The happier we are as individuals, the happier we are as communities – and vice versa. It’s our relationships and our connections that act as one of the most important determinants of our mental health.

Here in Wales we’re lucky this idea forms the core of the Welsh Government’s new mental health strategy. It’s right there within the strategy’s definition of mental health – mental health is a state of mental wellbeing that enables people to cope with the stresses of life, realise their abilities, learn well and work well, and contribute to their community

But for people who identify as LGBTQ+, this is rarely straightforward. Stonewall’s 2018 Home and Communities report found that less than half of people identifying as LGBTQ+ feel able to be open with their families about their identities. A workplace report found that more than a third of people identifying as LGBTQ+ had experienced discrimination at work. And Galop’s 2021 report found that 64% of people identifying as LGBTQ+ had experienced anti-LGBTQ+ violence or abuse, and 41% of trans people had experienced a hate crime focused on their gender identity.

Home, work, and the places we live – all examples of communities, and all spaces where people identifying as LGBTQ+ are facing barriers to feeling safe, and barriers to belonging.

The knock on effect of this is starkly reflected in UK figures from the Trevor project: nearly a third (27%) young people identifying  as LGBTQ+ living in unaccepting communities had attempted to end their life. But that drops to 16% when people felt more accepted and welcomed within their communities.

If we’re to deliver on the promise and ambition of the Welsh Government’s mental health strategy, then that means not leaving anyone behind. It means supporting a culture of welcoming and celebrating our differences. And it means a strong push back against the growing tide of politically-motivated division. We’re not born to hate.

Always welcome. Always heard.

At Platfform, we’re fortunate to have a significant number of colleagues who identify with the LGBTQ+ community. Some, within our senior leadership, have shared personal experiences of growing up in times when open and blatant discrimination and shaming was often the norm.

Such experiences have helped Platfform better understand the need to feel welcomed and understood. To belong. That runs through all our work; a connecting thread, drawn from and bolstered by the difficult first-hand experiences of staff and volunteers from all walks of life. We don’t do judgement, and we don’t do shame. We hear people on their own terms, as human beings.

It’s an approach that works; we supported 13,139 people last year, and within our housing and community focused services, 79-80% of people reported feeling safer within their homes and communities after working with our staff. That’s not possible if you don’t start from a point of willingness to listen to and welcome people.

The opposite of shame

Pride is the opposite of shame. We need events like Pride to stand as a line in the sand: to say that we’re done being a society that defines artificial ‘norms’ and seeks to induce shame in anyone seeming to step away from that. There are infinite ways to be human, each as real and as valid as our own individual lives are to us.

And it’s not just about accepting who we are, and the people around us. It’s about actively talking about and sharing our identities, and the joy that understanding ourselves and others can bring.

So that, in a nutshell, is why you’ll find us at Pride Cymru this year. And next year. And every year that we’re continuing to work towards a society where more people have access to the things we need for good mental health: community, connection, and opportunity.

If connection is what underpins our mental health, then love in all its forms is perhaps the strongest connection there is. That’s something we’ll always be excited to celebrate.