i-genius: Where did you get the inspiration to create Mindapples?
Andy Gibson: We all have mental health – we just don’t usually notice it until it goes wrong. But the way it’s usually talked about makes it sound like it’s something only experts can help us with, and that if we suffer from mental distress that will make us ‘different’ or ‘out of control’. But my personal experience is of a huge diversity of people who have their ups and downs and learn how to look after their minds through simple daily activities. And it just isn’t talked about, so we don’t see how much of it there is, and how society relies on it. For some reason there just aren’t the same everyday conversations about mental health as there are about going to the gym, or eating an apple.

Earlier this year my friend Paul told me about the 5-a-day campaign, which started as a simple concept but was then taken up by everyone from the NHS to supermarkets and smoothie makers, and had a huge impact on our attitudes to our physical health. When the Burger King opposite my flat closed down, I realised how a simple idea like that could change our behaviours, our economy, our society. The concept made us all think more about our physical health. So I started asking people: what’s the mental health equivalent of 5-a-day? People seemed to like the question. My professional background is building web technologies to enable grassroots solutions to social problems, so the next logical step was to build a simple a website (www.mindapples.org) and ask everyone the question, and then share their answers with the world.

It felt like quite a small idea at the time, but now it seems to be taking on a life of its own!

i-genius: What are the 5 things you should do every day for mental health?
Andy: I don’t think there’s a right answer, five things that everyone SHOULD do – but here are five things that I’ve found work for me:

1. Music, both listening and playing, and particularly playing the piano at the moment. It’s a good way to focus my mind on one thing at a time.
2. Talking to friends, particularly sharing the things I’m stressing about and getting perspective on them. They help me ‘shrink’ the things I’m worrying about.
3. ‘House gardening’ – tending to my environment, tidying, filing, watering plants – generally making my surroundings healthy and harmonious.
 4. Being in nature. It’s really humbling to feel connected to something so vast and self-sustaining.
5. Reading the football papers. It’s my version of following a soap opera. I think things which are interesting without being important are good for the mind.

Oh, and looking at modern art. Can I have 6 please?

i-genius: How important an issue is mental health?
Andy: Mental distress affects huge numbers of the world’s population directly and indirectly, and frankly how we help and respect each other when that happens is a big enough issue in its own right. But I think there’s more to it than that. I think there are emotional roots behind so many of our so-called ‘social problems’ – crime, addiction, ‘anti-social’ behaviour, disengagement, even physical health. The solutions won’t come from outside us: we have to start within ourselves. We ignore the personal dimension so much in politics, but imagine if we actually sat down as asked ourselves “How do we design our society to help people stay mentally healthy?” We’d quickly find a lot of things that need to change about how we live, work, educate, govern. I think mental health is the great neglected question in our policy debate, and in our daily lives.

i-genius: Do some countries have better than average mental health than others?
Andy: Hmm… I guess I hope we’ll get some sense of this from the Mindapples survey. I think there are a lot of aspects of ‘Western’ culture which seem to be constantly telling us we’re inadequate and attacking our self-esteem. Our whole economy is based on need, which means our advertisements constantly tell us how incomplete and lacking we are. It’s very bad for our minds. So my instinct is that countries which have a strong sense of community and family, cultivate a close relationship to nature, and give people space to take care of themselves mentally as well as physically, will be generally more mentally well-adjusted. But that’s just my personal perspective, based on what I need personally to be mentally well. We’ll only start discovering the full picture by asking everybody what works for them, and sharing that knowledge with the world.

i-genius: On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your own mental health and why?
Andy: I’d give myself a 7 – but I won’t say which way the scale goes! Over the years I’ve suffered from depression, anxiety and stress, but I’d definitely self-identify as ‘sane’. I think if you ask people whether they’ve ever suffered from mental illness they’d mostly say no; but if you ask them if they’ve ever felt like they couldn’t cope, or been really sad or angry and not really known why, most of us could relate to feeling like that. The main thing is to be conscious of what’s going on in our heads, how our minds work and don’t work. Generally, the more attention I pay to what’s going on in my head, the healthier I get.