Safely Held Spaces

Safely Held Spaces’ vision is of safe, compassionate, empowering support in local communities in the UK for people experiencing extreme mental and emotional distress and altered states, often called psychosis, and for the people supporting them. We're exploring the ways we think and talk about mental health, so we describe people experiencing distress as experiencers, and the people who support them as holders, rather than as patients and carers. We all make sense of our experiences of mental and emotional distress in different ways. For some of us it is helpful to have a name for what we are experiencing. Sometimes we may understand our experiences as an illness. For others our mental and emotional distress is an understandable response to difficult life events, relationships and circumstances, including things that happened when we were younger. For some of us our mental and emotional distress is seen as a necessary but painful process of growth, sometimes called a spiritual crisis.