Mental Health Swim Group

Mental Health Swims is a multi-award winning mental health peer support community. Since 2019 they have grown to have around 140 outdoor swim locations across the UK and beyond. Their mission is to create safe and welcoming spaces for people who want to improve their mental health and make connections in their community through swimming.

They have a unique offering because they are led by lived experience. All their volunteers and their team have lived experience of mental health challenges either personally or through supporting someone close to them.

One of their aims is for mental health issues to be talked about more openly and to build empathy and understanding around mental health within communities so that people never feel alienated or alone. In their journey so far, they have recruited some fantastic hosts who have put in so much hard work to create welcoming spaces based on a peer support model where people can show up as they are, share as little or as much as they like about their experiences all whilst enjoying a shared love of the water.

They focus on accepting people as they are today with no expectation of transformation. it’s not that their participants don’t experience amazing benefits to their wellbeing but we want to foster an environment where no one feels pressure to be anything but themselves. They want to make it as easy as possible for people living with mental illness to join in, to feel accepted and included and ultimately, fight mental illness stigma by doing this.