A Message from the Editor,
Sonia Last 📝
The gathering and harvesting is in full swing around our coastal waters and in our fields and orchards, so now it's time for fairs, festivals and gatherings of all kinds.
We hope you get to one of them, even if it's just a jolly chat under an apple tree to witness the wonders of transition, the flurry and activity and your part in it all.
Sonia
Sonia Last
Editor
MHScot isn't just a training provider. We're a community!
Most people book us for our Mental Health First Aid course - and that's a brilliant place to start. But if that's all you're using us for, you're only seeing a small part of what's here for you.
Training gives you the skills to start. Community is there for everything that comes after. That's the gap we built the rest of MHScot to fill:
🎙️ Inside Out: Mental Health at Work and In Life - our podcast, with guest speakers sharing real experience and expertise on the topics that come up in this work.
🤝 Network Events - for the "is this normal? has anyone else dealt with this?" moments.
🌐 Online Community - for going deeper than any one course or event has time for.
💬 WhatsApp Community - for the quick question you'd never book a whole session to ask.
Training gives you a framework. Community is what makes it stick - and that's what we actually are: not a course catalogue, but a community built around this work.
Book the course if you haven't. Then come find the rest!
Sharing and caring at work
Share your strategies and self-care routines with others at work by talking about how you manage stress; deal with conflict and prioritise workloads. Talking about how you look after yourself in a busy workplace and protect your emotional and physical wellbeing could be the key that helps others.
Sharing tactics on how you manage workloads and pressures can encourage us all to be proactive and reduce feelings of helplessness and overwhelm. These workplace/life skills can be instrumental in helping colleagues to avoid burnout and crisis.
Improve your collaboration and networking skills
If you want to boost your engagement and effectiveness at work while remaining relevant in the face of change, here are some tips from the experts:
How to deal with FOMO (fear of becoming obsolete) due to tech and AI. - AI Job worries grow, but some human skills can't be replaced by machines (The Guardian).
On 10th October, workplaces and communities around the world mark World Mental Health Day - a moment to pause and talk openly about mental health, both our own and the people we work alongside.
At MHScot, we see this as a chance to check in with colleagues, revisit the small habits that protect wellbeing, and remind ourselves that supporting mental health at work isn't a once-a-year conversation - it's something we build into every day.
This year, take a few minutes to ask a colleague how they're really doing, or simply give yourself permission to rest.
10 October 2026 – World Mental Health Day
Sleep as self care
Sleep is a marvellous escape from the ego and worldly cares and as necessary to our survival as air or water. Our healthiest sleep though is, 'when we are aware of the movement of the earth, the passage of the stars, the flow of the rivers.'
*Most of us are cut off from the natural world by walls and roofs and a forgetfulness of what we are. Opening our windows to listen to the owls, watch the bats or hear the rustle of leaves can help us hunker down with the birds in their nests and the animals in their burrows and know that sleep is ours and ours alone.
*(Anthony Burgess, On Going to Bed, London,1982)
Favourite Quote:
'I love my sleep. My life has a tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?'
- Ernest Hemingway
As the season turns and the fields empty, there's something worth borrowing from the harvest: nothing grows well alone, and nothing worth keeping is gathered in a single day. Wellbeing works the same way - it's built in small, repeated moments, not one big effort.
So as the nights draw in, take the season's cue. Rest when you can. Reach out when you need to. And if you haven't yet found your way into the MHScot community, let this be your nudge - there's a table under the apple tree with your name on it.
Warm wishes,
Sonia
Sonia and the MHScot Team
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