Founder: Asha Iqbal

I had struggled for numerous years with anxiety and other problems but I had such a wall put up that anyone who encountered me didn’t realise anything was wrong. This was mainly due to the stigma attached to mental health as I was so concerned about the label that I would be attached with if I was so open.

In the last couple of years, I had realised how important the cultural aspects play in part of getting mental health treatments and this is where services should be able to adapt to understand their service users and so many services and organisations fail this way.

I have a background of working with people from all ages that included young vulnerable girls being groomed, running peer pressure workshops to year 8/9 students, young offenders and to even working in a service that provides care to palliative patients. My varied experience has given me an insight into a wide variety of victims in difficult situations facing numerous mental health conditions. I want to put my experiences and my own personal experience into ensuring services are improved so as a society we can work towards better mental health.

Founded March 2017

Asha Iqbal is also an impactful public speaker who speaks upon her personal experience when delivering her speeches and draws upon what needs addressing and how this can be achieved.

As part of Generation Reform Asha also runs awareness and campaigns online, mainly on Twitter where her engagement is hitting 2 million per month consistently and she is making an impact on a wider basis through her honest and open conversations about mental health. She is a proud MQ mental health ambassador “It was a privilege to be asked to be part of the campaign, I had followed MQ’s journey when they did their celeb campaign! For me it was a no brainer and I said yes straight away! What they do is so important for orgs like myself as we rely on research to see where we need to make an impact but so much BME mental health research is lacking and this can be cruicial to getting funding for mental health projects. ”

For the first time in history Women’s health magazine covered a story that featured a culture crime and the mental health impact on it. I had been approached by Women’s health to be involved in their mental health campaign and it was an honour to be part of something that I grew up in reading and following. For me it was so important to be raising awareness in the publication that has a high women’s readership