Like the Booker Prize, World Mental Health Day seems to come round faster each year. Both are a time for celebration. In the case of World Mental Health Day, it is also intended to raise awareness on the importance of wellbeing, of not stigmatising people who experience mental illness, and of the links between how people are treated – at home, at work and in their communities – and the mental health of the population, which impacts on everything, including the economy.

I will write about literature and mental health another time. Of interest to me this year is another juxtaposition with World Mental Health Day. I’m talking about the belated announcement on the state of NHS finances for the first three months of 2015/16, and what Professor Keiran Walshe has described as the triple whammy:

• Lack of adequate growth funding to match the inexorably increasing demand of an ageing population and the many new treatments which patients have grown to expect
• Much higher expectations on standards and staffing from regulators and the public after crises such as Mid Staffordshire
• Pressures on the NHS caused by increasing problems in funding and delivering social care

There have been a number of wise comments on what this means, none better than by Professor Chris Ham of the Kings Fund. Here at 07.10 on the Today programme, he explains that the Treasury has no option but to foot the bill in the NHS and social care, OR the government must come clean with the public about the unpalatable choices that the NHS will have to make in order to balance the books.

This has never happened before in my memory. And I am worried for my former colleagues. There are now so many trusts in “special measures” that the measures can no longer be considered special. The organisations whose role was to support troubled trusts, the Strategic Health Authorities, were reorganised out of existence under the reforms that some seem to have forgotten preceded the current crisis. There seems little possibility of NHS Improvement, the new body about to be formed from the independent regulator Monitor and the Trust Development Authority, being ready or able to act with the speed, depth and impact required to stop the multiple trains about to hit the buffers.

There have already been a few high profile dismissals/resignations. And there are increasing concerns about the demands placed on those prepared to run trusts these days. Knowing that everyone else is in a similar position is not much help when you are lying awake in the small hours wondering how you will meet all the bills and not run out of cash while juggling all the other demands that keep patients safe. Doing this while wondering whether you will have a job yourself by the end of the month does not help.

Rosebeth Moss Kanter wrote about the difficult “middles of change” in the Harvard Business review in 2009. She said:

Welcome to the miserable middles of change. This is the time when Kanter’s Law kicks in. Everything looks like a failure in the middle. Everyone loves inspiring beginnings and happy endings; it is just the middles that involve hard work.

It’s worth reading the whole article and reflecting on why it is that we ignore such wisdom in the NHS.

The NHS is at the start of the most difficult middle it will ever face. At such a time, it seems vital to me that NHS trust leaders, staff, commissioners, regulators and partners do a small number of things, and take great care to avoid some others.

• Remember why you are there. Hold hard and true to those values
• Get in the same boat with everyone else and start rowing together in the same direction
• Give praise and encouragement frequently and generously. Remember that humans need on average a ratio of 12:1 praise to criticism. People give discretionary effort when they are heartened. When they are disheartened, they lose hope and eventually give up
• In particular, avoid criticism which plays to the gallery, scores points, justifies your own position or for which there is not a readily applicable solution
• When making difficult decisions for which there are no easy answers, ask what you would prefer to be pilloried on the front page of the Daily Mail for. Then do that
• In a crisis, kindness is much underrated. Take care of yourself and be kind to yourself. Only then can you be truly kind to others

Happy World Mental Health Day 2015 everyone. I send you much love. Thank you for doing what you do. You are amazing.