The theme of this year is kindness, but you can raise awareness for anything you feel passionate about mental health. The Mental Health Foundation already produced some resources to help you get involved, and I’d recommend using these as a starting point. 

 

Don’t feel you need to produce lots 

To start with I want to let you know you don’t have to write lots of content. Sometimes writing one powerful piece can raise awareness and be more beneficial than writing a blog a day, for example. 

I do this because I want to cover the week as thoroughly as I can. My writing schedule means that I write these posts well in advance. But if you look at the content, I’m only writing one blog post that is about my own experiences with sleep. 

Mental health awareness week can be stressful, and you can feel like you have to create blogs every day and do a lot. But you don’t. Whatever you do for the week is good enough and helps out MHF and the mental health community online.

It can be one powerful blog post that raises awareness for something that matters to you. So don’t worry if you can’t write a blog a day, just focus on writing what matters to you.

Blog

So while we’re on the subject of blogs let’s get into the types of blogs you could write. The theme of this year is kindness so you could write a blog showing where someone is kind to you, or how being kind to others (like volunteering) has helped your mental health.

We are always in situations where we make the choice of being kind or being unkind. This theme reflects the kindness we’re seeing more off with communities helping the elderly and self-isolating at this time. The Mental Health Foundation wants us to “rediscover our connection to kindness and each other in our daily lives” and that’s certainly a positive message we need during this time.

You may not know what to write straight away so jot down a few ideas of what you could write. This week is all about raising awareness and talking about things that are passionate to you. Think about what they are and how you could put that into a blog.

Getting Involved On Social

Social is a great place to get involved in Mental Health Awareness Week. A lot of the conversation will happen on social media (especially Twitter), which means you can build awareness for your blog, and the issues you want to talk about. 

MFH often post a lot on their socials this week, and you can show your support by liking their posts and dropping a comment. They may also create some hashtags or events you can get involved with on social.

If you don’t have that much time for social, then here can be a great place to start. If you don’t have time to make posts yourself, you can always comment on a few others on hashtags like #MHAW where they’ll be a lot of people sharing their thoughts.

But feel free to create your own posts too. You could promote the link to your blog using free stock photos and Canva to design the graphics. There are so many things you can do on social to make a difference.

But remember, a 24/7 stream of mental health content may not always be beneficial. You won’t get around to replying to every post, or seeing everything there. I like to set a time limit to how often I spend time on social in “work mode” which is actively responding and engaging in the mental health community. 

You can also schedule up the posts too (there are a range of tools here, some have free plans like Hootsuite) which you can use. This means you don’t have to keep logging into your accounts all the time and means you can take more of a step back from social if you need to. 

Play it by ear

Mental Health Awareness Week shouldn’t need to get stressful. It’s essential to look after your own mental health too. It should be a fun time for you to get involved in talking about mental health to the nation and all the awareness and conversation that takes place this week.

But with so much going on you might be a little apprehensive when you’re starting for the first time. It can be scary to start with, so it’s ok not to throw yourself into the deep end of social media straight away. 

Feel comfortable with what you’re doing. This is a time to raise awareness for the issues that are passionate about you. You’ve got this opportunity to get more readers and spread your message to more people during this week.

But don’t let that become stressful. Start planning early, have everything scheduled, so it’s not a rush on the day. If it’s your first mental health awareness week, it’s great to be involved in, and if you’ve got any questions or your not sure how to write something then just send me a message, and I’ll be happy to help.