About Us

Hello there, I’m Savannah, I am 27 years old, and I am a Senior Mental Health Support Worker within Response Community Team. When we began this course, I was working within the Oxford Health Adult Mental Health Team but moved to Response in November 2022.

I work with people living in our supported accommodations across Oxford, with a variety of mental illnesses with varying degrees, including Personality Disorders.

The core purpose of my job is to enable adult service users to learn about their individual mental health and develop skills to manage. We also provide recovery-based support our service users to stay out of hospital and to live as independently as possible in the community.

Values which are important to me are Creativity and Compassion. Creativity in the sense that everyone is unique, and this encourages me to think outside the box. Compassion is important to me as I treat each person as a loved one and treat them with the respect and dignity they deserve. Also, acceptance for oneself is one of the first steps of recovery so to be compassionate is likely to encourage positive change.

I chose to focus on the section ‘I’ve Just Been Diagnosed’ as I was given my own EUPD diagnosis in 2018 and have evolved in such a way that I am working to help others with their difficulties. I also have members of friends and family with Personality Disorders, so I am familiar with the term.

This section is for anyone with, knows, or suspects someone with a Personality Disorder. It includes the signs of the illness, potential indicators for developing it and recommended treatment.

I am passionate about working with people with a PD diagnosis as I know for certain that everyone has potential and can find ways to manage their pain, thoughts, and behaviours.

I’d also encourage you to look through the ‘STARs On Therapy’ section to hear directly from people who have a diagnosis of Personality Disorder and their advice and outlook to those struggling with this part of their journey.

Thank you for reading and hopefully you find something of use or interest within our website.

Hi, my name is Roz. I’m 26 years old and I’m a personality disorder work for Elmore Community Services, embedded within one of the Keystone Community Mental Health and Wellbeing hubs in Oxfordshire. We work with adults who have personality difficulty using the Structured Psychological Support intervention to help individuals do more of what works for them. My team also provides peer support from experts-by-experience, employment support, and other psychological therapies on a group and 1-1 basis. 

I worked on the Coping Strategies section of this website because I and people I have worked with have struggled with resources online being too generic, or too overwhelming to be accessible when we need them. The Coping Strategies section of this website uses principles from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Dialectical Behavioural Therapy, Mindfulness and Compassion-Focused approaches. I’ve tried to make it more bite-sized and accessible by making it colourful and more like a ”menu” of strategies to pick from and then explore more when feeling more settled. I’ve also tried to include a bit of background as to why some strategies are more helpful in different situations and what function the strategies might serve. 

You can print the strategy sheets off, share them with friends and family, or keep them on your phone to look at while you are out and about. 

We would love to hear your feedback on what has been helpful and if you’ve come across other resources which you think are worth sharing!

Hi, I am Jess (27) and I am an Occupational Therapist working in the S.75 Social Work Team. I support service users that are open to the Adult Mental Health Team providing rehabilitation based interventions to maximise their independence and safety with activities of daily living and accessing the community, whilst also regaining life skills. I also support the social workers to review service users within their current placements to ensure their needs are being supported efficiently whilst utiliising their strengths to promote their quality of life. I currently provide Assistive Technology training to my team to support colleagues to consider the least restrictive tools when a service user requires prompts or guidance with tasks such as medication management. 

I have enjoyed making this website alongside my colleagues. I decided to take on the crisis planning page and hope this can help people to consider useful strategies and tools to have in place if a crisis should arise. I also supported making the medication videos. 

Our website objective was to support people with learning about their diagnosis and treatment whilst also providing a learning tool for professionals and family members. I hope this website reaches the correct audience as we are very excited by the outcome and the real life experiences we have been able to include in our videos thanks to the STARS. 

Thank you for reading! 🙂

Hi, I am Lucy, I'm 23 years old and I work for an organisation called Response as a Senior Mental Health Support Worker. 

Within Response I work for the 'Residential Team'. We work within three different supported accommodations to support the adults living there with their mental health needs, improving their living skills, increasing their engagement and involvement in the community, building their independence, support them with medication, and help them when they are ready to move on.

We work on the foundations of being creative, caring, safe and aspirational as well ensuring we are providing person-centered care and are working within a psychologically informed environment. 

I worked on the FAQ page. I took an interest on this page as I wanted to ensure that the voices of those with the diagnosis were heard and that the page was authentic and genuine. In order to achieve this we reached out to our service users to ask them what questions they had and have around Personality Disorders and then reached out to our STARS to provide their views and insights on their experiences and journey with their Personality Disorders. 

In an effort to make this website bitesize and engaging we had the STARS record video responses to our service users questions which again contributed to the authentic and warm atmosphere we wanted to create on the website. 

Thank you for visiting our site and we hope you find something that will help you along your journey