MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS WEEK 2020: DAY 1

The theme for this week is kindness. I’ll be digesting kindness with my thoughts tomorrow and sharing what our amazing mental health community thinks later in the week.

But before I tell you what’s coming up, if you’re new here, I’m Jake Symons, and ever since I started on the journey of my mental health recovery, I’ve been passionate about sharing my story. Helping others gave me a purpose, and starting this blog helped my recovery. Now I’m thankfully a lot further down my recovery journey, and it’s great to be here with you this week and share in this MHAW with you.

As expected with social distancing, there has to be a cut back of the offline events that happen. But like last year my schedule runs fully online so let me talk you through what you can expect from this week.

What’s coming up

Tomorrow I’ll be releasing my blog which talks about how being kind and the kindness of others have both helped improve my mental health.

Wednesday I’ll be looking at the resources from the MHF and their research on kindness and adding my opinion to that.

Thursday will be a time to share your kindness examples that have featured in the news, your blogs, social media and ones that have been given to me directly.

We’ll be closing the week off big on Friday with a roundup of all the best content from blogs discussing mental health this week.

There will be no blogs on the weekend, but I’ll be going through social and catching up with as many on the #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek and #KindnessMatters as I can. Feel free to say hello.

Social media has been our main way of communicating for the last few weeks now, and it’s where so many conversations happen. If you know where to look, there is an amazing mental health community on social.

I know that I can come to this community when I’m feeling low, and they’ll be someone out that that’s able to make me feel better. I’m looking forward to getting back involved and going through this week with them.

I’ll also be keeping an eye out for fantastic content created by you, the community, for Friday’s big roundup post. I’ll aim to find as many quality pieces that I can. If you feel something should be included then send it over to me.

Mental Monday: The Big Friendly Conversation about Mental Health is back! I’ll be live on YouTube every day until Friday at 7 PM UK Time (11 AM PDT) sharing my mental health experiences, my best finds of the day and anything you want to talk about it. No script, just a big friendly conversation about mental health.

I’d love for you to come and say hello on any of my socials (direct messages are open). I’m looking forward to sharing this week with everyone.

If you’re looking to get involved in MHAW yourself, then the MHF have produced some social media graphics you could share, which is always the first place to start. I’ve also written some of my best blogging tips if you’d like to write something.