Radio 4’s All in the Mind follows participant Charlotte on the job

Radio 4 programme All in the Mind has spent a day following Think Ahead participant Charlotte Seymour in her role training to be a mental health social worker – getting a unique insight into the kind of work she does supporting people with mental health problems.

To hear the full programme you can visit the BBC website. Or you can listen to Charlotte’s segment here:

All in the Mind presenter Claudia Hammond interviewed Charlotte and joined her for two meetings with service users – one who was nearing discharge after working with Charlotte for a while, and another who had recently had a setback due to a family bereavement.

Claudia explains on the programme: “It’s very unusual to get permission to sit in on sessions like this and to record them, and I think it’s a mark of how much her clients value her that they wanted other people to hear what she does.”

During the interview, Charlotte reflects on the unpredictable nature of the job: “That’s one of the good things about training on the job – just being able to think on your feet a bit and maintain that positivity. You are both assessing and trying to understand what the risks are.”

All in the Mind first met Charlotte in December 2016 when they interviewed her about her motivations for joining the programme and how her first three months of on-the-job training had gone. In this new piece Charlotte also talks about how she’s been getting on since then: “I’m definitely enjoying the job. There are still shocking things that you see […] now we have our caseload and we have a lot of responsibility.”

Back in December, All in the Mind also interviewed Think Ahead participant Al Tooms about how he was finding the programme. A follow-up programme featuring Al will be broadcast in the next few weeks.