You may wish to meet with your prospective parliamentary candidates (PPC) ahead of voting day on 4 July. This will give you the opportunity to ask them to support the issues that matter to you and ensure they prioritise mental health if they are elected as your MP.

Read on for further information to support you with your campaigning efforts during this general election.

Meeting your election candidates

During the election period you may meet your local candidates when they are campaigning in your area or you may wish to contact them directly to ask them to meet with you in-person or online. Here are the steps you can take: 

• Find out who your election candidates are by entering your postcode on www.whocanivotefor.co.uk. Contact information is available for each candidate when you click on their name. Please remember that candidates are very busy during the election period so try to remain as flexible as you can when arranging at date to meet. 
• Email your candidates briefly explaining why you would like to meet them. Here is a template you can use.
• You could tell your candidates that you would be happy to join a meeting or local hustings if one has already been set up in your constituency. Hustings is a meeting where election candidates or parties debate policies and answer questions from the audience.
• Chase your election candidates if you don’t hear back from them. Try calling their office and flagging your email with them.
• Tell us by email that your meeting has been booked at campaigns@rethink.org
• Send us your feedback. Let us know how the meeting went and don’t forget to send us a photo of you with your candidates if you took one.

Five Tips for an effective meeting with your election candidates

Once you have set up a meeting with your candidates or if you are attending a hustings, here are a few tips to make sure your meeting goes well. 

1. Be well prepared. You don’t have to be an expert but it’s good to read the over the points below so you have a grasp on what the main issues are beforehand. It’s also useful to make some notes of the key things you want to say to help you remember during the meeting
2. Make it personal by sharing your own story. If you have lived experience of mental illness or if you care for someone living with severe mental illness, share this with your candidate (to the extent that you feel comfortable). You may want to think about which elements of your experience you want to share ahead of time. Talking about your own experience helps to bring the issue to life and enables your election candidate to understand how their policies directly impacts people’s lives. 
3. Keep the meeting on track. Confirm how much time your candidate has before you meet with them. 
4. Aim for a friendly discussion. It will help you to have a productive conversation and get your points across. The candidate won’t be able to instantly provide all of the answers you might be hoping for, or make promises around what they can deliver. But they should listen to what you’re saying, and hopefully become an ally when it comes to supporting improvements to our mental health services.
5. Arrange a way of following up with your election candidate after the meeting.

What we want from the next government on mental health

There might be a long list of things you want to cover in your meeting, but often time is short so it is helpful to focus the discussion around the key points you want to cover. 

To help with this, we are sharing our three calls for what we want the next government to deliver. We encourage you to raise these issues with candidates if you would also like the next government to prioritise them. 

We are calling on the next government to deliver:

1. A long-term strategy to improve mental health across society addressing the drivers of mental illness. It must make use of every opportunity to improve outcomes, from schools to workplaces, from the social security system to housing.
2. Mental health services which support people in crisis, but are also geared towards prevention. We can help prevent people reaching crisis point by investing in our NHS workforce to cut waiting lists; rolling out community interventions for young people to keep kids out of hospital, and driving clinical research to identify and treat mental illness early.
   
   We want to work with the next government to improve the lives of people severely affected by mental illness, take pressure off the NHS and save taxpayer money. We want to build constituencies that care. 
   
   You can find out more about Constituencies that Care here.
3. A 21st Century Mental Health Act, finally updating 1980s legislation on how we treat and care for people when they are acutely unwell. Read more about our work on the Mental Health Act. 

Key mental health statistics

Here are some useful statistics about mental health that you may want to share with your election candidates.

• Mental health problems cost the UK at least £118bn a year.
• Two out of three people state they worry about the mental health of friends or family.
• Under 40s rank mental health as a higher national priority than climate change.
• The country at large ranks its importance above jobs and unemployment, industrial action and Brexit.