Mental wellbeing is part of everyday life.

Self Serenity grew from lived experience, recovery and discovering how much the way we live each day can influence how we feel.

I’m Nicola Reeve, founder of Self Serenity and a mental health advocate. My understanding of mental wellbeing is both personal and practical. I have experienced serious mental health challenges, including psychosis and psychiatric hospital admissions, and I know what it is like when life changes beyond recognition and you have to find your way forward again.

Recovery taught me that mental wellbeing reaches far beyond a diagnosis. It is woven through everyday life — how we think and feel, how we rest, nourish and move our bodies, how we care for ourselves, the people and experiences we surround ourselves with, and how well we understand what we need.

That understanding became the beginning of Self Serenity.

LIVED EXPERIENCE MEETS PROFESSIONAL EXPERTISE

My lived experience eventually led me to become an Expert by Experience (EBE) with Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust.

The Trust’s Experts by Experience Programme sits within its Participation & Experience Team, under Dr Katherine Allen (PhD), Lead for Recovery, Service User, Carer and Family Experience. The programme brings people with lived experience into the work of the Trust, where their knowledge and perspectives can help influence and shape mental health services.

My involvement as an EBE extends across many different areas of mental healthcare. I sit on recruitment panels, bringing lived experience into the selection of people who will work within mental health services. I have been involved in activities on acute wards, speaking with people experiencing some of the same frightening and difficult circumstances that I once experienced myself. I have contributed to Trust strategy and projects, and spoken on behalf of the Trust — using my experience to bring the perspective of someone who has been both a patient and a participant in improving mental health services.

I am also involved in the Patient Library Programme, a collaboration with the University of Birmingham which gives fourth-year medical students the opportunity to talk directly with Experts by Experience about mental health. It offers a different kind of learning: future doctors can ask questions, have open conversations and explore mental health with someone who can describe what it actually feels like to experience illness, treatment, hospital care and recovery.

Through this work, I have met and worked alongside other people with lived experience and professionals from across mental health. It has shown me how powerful those different forms of knowledge can be when they come together.

Lived experience brings an understanding that can only come from having been there. Professional expertise brings knowledge, training, research and another way of understanding the challenges people face. Self Serenity brings the value of both into one place.

Mental health advocacy is at the heart of what I do, but it takes different forms. As an Expert by Experience, I use my lived experience to help shape better mental health services. Through Self Serenity, I use that experience to help people shape life beyond those services — supporting positive mental wellbeing and creating greater calm through everyday choices.

FROM EXPERIENCE TO SELF SERENITY

A PLACE TO EXPLORE, DISCOVER AND CONNECT

Self Serenity is a positive mental wellbeing platform grounded in real life.

It is a place to understand yourself more deeply, explore what supports your mental wellbeing and discover ideas, experiences and resources that can make a meaningful difference to how you feel and live.

The Six Foundations of Self Serenity — MIND, REST, NOURISH, MOVE, NURTURE and RENEW — reflect this wider view of wellbeing. They offer different ways to explore the parts of everyday life that can influence how we feel, without suggesting there is one right way to achieve positive mental wellbeing.

And Self Serenity goes beyond the Six Foundations.

It brings together lived experience and professional perspectives with practical tools, thoughtful content, useful resources and carefully chosen recommendations. As Self Serenity grows, there will be more opportunities to learn, discover, participate and connect — always with positive mental wellbeing at its heart.

What began with my own need to understand myself and find a way forward has grown into something with a much wider purpose: to help people discover what supports their own positive mental wellbeing and create greater calm through the everyday choices they make.

My hope is that Self Serenity becomes somewhere you can return to at different points in your life — to understand something you're experiencing, discover a different way of supporting yourself, find something genuinely useful, hear from someone whose experience resonates with your own, or simply explore an area of wellbeing that interests you.

It will continue to grow through lived experience, professional knowledge and the experiences and ideas of the people who become part of it.

Because positive mental wellbeing isn't something we simply achieve and tick off. It changes as we do. It is something we can continue to understand, nurture and shape throughout everyday life.

Mental wellbeing is part of everyday life.

LIVED EXPERIENCE MEETS PROFESSIONAL EXPERTISE

FROM EXPERIENCE TO SELF SERENITY

A PLACE TO EXPLORE, DISCOVER AND CONNECT

Explore Self Serenity

This website uses cookies.