Stand to Reason

About Us

Stand to Reason has recently been launched and registered as a charity. Already we have several hundred highly motivated members all of whom have suffered or experienced the stigma of mental ill health directly or indirectly. Indeed over ten per cent of members have volunteered their time to our organisation. Our Board and Director have all experienced the stigma of mental distress directly or indirectly and our constitution enshrines that we are a service-user led organisation.

We are of course approaching celebrities and public figures to join us, but we think it is important to counter the view that such people are the exception to the rule – ie. they are immune from the ordinary everyday stigma of mental illness. Our membership demonstrate that recovery takes many different forms – for someone with acute social anxiety, the first steps of ‘recovery’ can mean being able to post a letter or visit the corner shop. Members are drawn from a diverse range of backgrounds, which the following selection demonstrates:

the founder of a lobbying company and seminar organiser; a director at one national and one local mental health charity; a former psychiatrist (now artist); a finance director of one of Britain’s best known retail chains; a former lawyer now a trainee vicar; an executive from MTV; a GP who co-founded the Doctors Support Network; an investment banker; a producer at the BBC; a former Chair of CND; a senior manager from one of the clearing banks; a senior civil servant; a director of mental health services at an NHS Trust, a senior policy adviser to the Department of Health from one of the professional organisations.

In particular, our membership includes some of those who participated in the recent Stephen Fry television documentary on bipolar disorder.

Board of Trustees

Anne Beales
Anne is the Director of the Service User Directorate and Fundraising at Together (Formerly the Mental After Care Association). Together is a leading mental health charity providing support around 3500 people through more than 100 mental health services around the country

Dominic Church
Dominic is Managing Director of a successful public affairs consultancy, Westminster Advisers. He advises senior managers within the private, voluntary and public sectors on government relations and parliamentary affairs, and has a special interest in health and community care policy. Before joining commercial consultancy, Dominic worked in the not-for-profit sector as campaigner and also in the political media. Dominic has been a local government councillor in Hammersmith and Fulham, and continues to be actively involved in community and national politics. He is a full member of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

Mike Mills
Mike is a highly-experienced journalist who has been Television Editor and Features Editor at the Times and before that the Editor of London’s What’s On Magazine and strengthens our PR and communications offering.

Dr Liz Miller
Liz is the co-founder of the Doctor’s Support Network and a frequent columnist for ‘Pendulum’ the magazine of MDF the Bipolar Organisation, has long experience of self-management of mental illness and expertise in emotional literacy, diet and exercise.

Rachel Perkins
Rachel is a service user and Clinical Director of the Adult Mental Health Services at St George’s Mental Health Trust, formerly a member of the Disability Rights Commission’s Mental Health Action Group and National Social Inclusion Implementation Team.

Marjorie Thompson
Marjorie is a Californian transplant who has lived in Britain for 24 years. In that time she has worked for some of Britain’s most famous ‘brand names’: the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Saatchi & Saatchi, the Commission for Racial Equality and the Royal College of Nursing. She has spoken to audiences on five continents on subjects including corporate social responsibility, how pressure groups influence Parliament, cause-related marketing, the new Europe and the Euro-American relationship, secrets of ‘Inspired Leaders’ and democracy and the lobbying process. At Saatchi & Saatchi, Cause Connection was set up to promote cause-related marketing but more importantly to promote the idea that every brand should have a social dimension—as legitimately recognisable as its rational and emotional aspects. She and her boss Hamish Pringle wrote the best-selling ‘Brand Spirit: How Cause-Related Marketing Builds Brands’ which became an amazon.co.uk business book of the year in 1999 and is now in 8 languages.

Robert Westhead
Robert works for SHIFT the government programme to tackle stigma and discrimination, where he is responsible for the media and communications having previously worked as a national news journalist for five years, latterly at the national press agency, the Press Association.

Roger Wakefield
Roger has been a partner in the top twenty UK solicitors, Nabarro, for 20 years and currently leads their London projects team. He is married with 3 children and lives in Hayes in Kent. Before that he was director of legal affairs for the leading building industry employers association where he was also chief executive of the industry pensions company. Since 2005, Roger has been an external member of the Charitable Funds for the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Roger’s father suffered severe mental health problems and committed suicide in 1976.

Lynn Young
Lynn has been the Primary Health Care Adviser, RCN since October 1990. Before that she was a district nurse in West London. During the last decade the major part of her work has focussed on the development of primary health care policy and practice within the context of health and social care reform. This includes the development of PHC organisations, clinical governance, commissioning, nurse leadership in primary and public health, public and patient involvement, new GMS Contract, the prevention of coronary heart disease, nutrition and tobacco control. Most recent work includes the development of Community Matron, practice based commissioning, the future PHC workforce, ‘Commissioning a Patient – Led NHS’ and ‘Our health, our care, our say’. She is also facilitating the Working in Partnership Programme (WiPP) work which has 13 projects, two of which are the development of nursing and health care assistants in general practice. In November 2004 Lynn was awarded an Honorary Fellowship Royal College General Practitioners FRCGP (hons).

Director

Jonathan Naess
After studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, Jonathan has enjoyed an uninterrupted twelve year career in three different but related positions in the city, notwithstanding having suffered from serious mental illness since his early twenties. He trained and practised as a corporate finance lawyer at international law firm Watson, Farley and Williams, then became Senior Manager of regulation at the London Stock Exchange plc’s AIM market, before joining Nabarro Wells & Co Limited a corporate finance advisory house specialising in public company flotations on the LSE as well as mergers and acquisitions. Jonathan is currently on a year’s sabbatical from Nabarro Wells, where he is an equity partner and director.

Jonathan is a Visiting Research Associate at the Institute of Psychiatry, a trustee of the Mosaic Clubhouse of the ICCD – a psycho-social rehabilitation project in Balham, an external member of the Charitable Funds for the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and is an active member of MDF the Bipolar Organisation.

Medical Patron

Professor Graham Thornicroft
Graham Thornicroft is an internationally recognised leading expert in tackling stigma and discrimination and Professor of Community Psychiatry, and Head of the multi-disciplinary Health Service and Population Research Department at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. He is a Consultant Psychiatrist and is Director of Research and Development at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust. He chaired the External Reference Group for the National Service Framework for Mental Health in England. His areas of research expertise include: stigma and discrimination, mental health needs assessment, the development of outcome scales, cost-effectiveness evaluation of mental health treatments, and mental health services in less economically developed countries. He has authored and co-authored 20 books and over 160 papers in peer reviewed journals.