Frankie Bridge

Why organisations work with Frankie Bridge

• She turns a wellbeing agenda into a conversation employees actually join. Lived-experience voices move audiences past the policy document in a way clinical presentations rarely do.
• Her two books, OPEN and GROW, are co-written with clinical psychologist Maleha Khan and psychiatrist Dr Mike McPhillips, which gives the material a structure beyond memoir and a reference employees can take home.
• She is a formal ambassador for Mind, the UK’s largest mental health charity, anchoring her advocacy in a named institution rather than personal testimony alone.
• Her platform reaches the employee demographic most corporate wellbeing programmes struggle to engage: women aged 25 to 45, working parents, and audiences outside the usual executive wellbeing circuit.

Biography highlights

• Ambassador for Mind, the UK mental health charity, following hospitalisation in May 2012 for anxiety, depression and panic attacks.
• Author of OPEN: Why Asking for Help Can Save Your Life, a Sunday Times bestseller co-written with clinical psychologist Maleha Khan and psychiatrist Dr Mike McPhillips.
• Author of GROW: Motherhood, mental health and me, published 2021, again with Khan and McPhillips.
• Host of Open Mind with Frankie Bridge, a podcast running since 2019 across Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Global Player.
• Regular panellist on ITV’s Loose Women since 2021, speaking publicly on anxiety and women’s health.
• Former member of The Saturdays (2007 to 2014) and runner-up on BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing 2014.

Biography

A wellbeing programme only works when employees believe the people in front of them have been where they have. That credibility is hard to manufacture from a policy deck or a clinician’s slide set. Bridge built her audience on the opposite ground, by talking openly about her 2012 hospitalisation for anxiety and depression while still a member of one of the UK’s biggest pop acts.

Her book OPEN: Why Asking for Help Can Save Your Life came out of that period and became a Sunday Times bestseller. It was co-written with clinical psychologist Maleha Khan and psychiatrist Dr Mike McPhillips, which is what separates it from a standard celebrity memoir. GROW, published in 2021, applied the same format to maternal mental health, again with Khan and McPhillips, and addressed anxiety in pregnancy and the early years of parenting.

The advocacy sits inside a formal relationship with Mind, the UK mental health charity, where she is a named ambassador. Her Open Mind podcast extends the work across longer conversations with guests from public life, and her seat on ITV’s Loose Women keeps mental health vocabulary in mainstream women’s broadcasting.

For a corporate audience, the specific value is reach into the employee groups that wellbeing programmes most often miss. Working women in their late twenties to mid forties recognise her from television, bookshops and podcasts, and listen differently because of it. That is the variable most internal mental-health campaigns cannot solve with budget alone.

Key speaking topics

• Mental health in the workplace
• Maternal mental health
• Anxiety, depression and panic
• Employee wellbeing and lived experience
• Women’s health at work
• Reducing stigma in corporate mental health conversations

Ideal for

• Employee wellbeing days, mental health awareness events and internal conferences where lived experience lands harder than clinical theory alone.
• HR, people and DEI teams building programmes for working parents, particularly women returning from maternity leave.
• Women’s networks and ERGs looking for a recognisable broadcaster who speaks credibly on anxiety and maternal mental health.

Audience outcomes

• A clear reference point, anchored in two published books, for how to talk about anxiety and depression at work without defaulting to policy language.
• A direct look at how maternal mental health shows up in the early years of a career return, drawn from Bridge’s work with her clinical co-authors.
• Permission for employees to treat mental health conversations as normal rather than escalatory, which in turn lifts engagement with existing wellbeing resources.
• A concrete answer to the question most wellbeing programmes struggle with: what does asking for help actually look like in practice, from someone who has done it.