World Mental Health Day - celebration
Every year the festival of Mental Health Day, which is celebrated worldwide every 3rd October, is observed worldwide. On this date, countries unite to celebrate their countries’ vision of supporting mental health and inclusion of mental health treatment, through festivals. In Sri Lanka, many events have been organized and held to make a change.
We were pleased to get the opportunity to curate the content that was the sole content of our festival and initiated the school-based workshops, which took place on October 2-2nd. We chose the subject of bullying and added seminars that addressed coping skills and stress management training for schools, the performance of school activities, how to be healthy, and having the conversation about mental health. To connect the conversation with students, we were able to give each student a read-out of the importance of creating a positive and healthy social climate in the school. The reading-out gave the school students lessons on topics such as being proactive when it comes to bullying; having the skills to turn things around; how to intervene quickly and proactively as soon as bullying happens; and how to think about a solution, that is preventing bullying from happening in the first place. We ensured that we brought back all our interventions – the programs and events - for the next years and then integrated them within our week of events.
We also have a challenge was a school-based competition between schools to create the art that will be promoted through our Mental Health Day initiative. The competition received a lot of participation from schools, which reached out to us to invite us to take part in the ‘Building a Positive & Healthy. After the beginning of the workshops, there was an unveiling of a mural showing the message ‘sagitta’ (unity), reflecting the United Nations message for mental health awareness and raising awareness towards mental illness. We are going to complete the mural by the end of this month so that it is shared on Mental Health Day.
We have facilitated student workshops on various types of learning styles, to ensure that students are familiarized with the content, in addition to enabling students to interact freely with their school team and each other. Also, to get them interested in attending our events, there was the help of the school’s psychologist to assist students with their mental health.
The main activity in the year 2019 – the school-wide free lunch for both students and staff – will be continued throughout the day. This year, as well, the school’s psychologist will conduct a mental health screening for school staff. We hope to make their job easier when it comes to mental health so that they can be vigilant, whenever they notice a student who is more affected than they can be.
To ensure that we fulfill our commitment of being on a mission to provide information and solutions, we are planning a mental health documentary, which will be launched later this month. So when the film is released, we will be able to say that the school has transformed into a small corner of the school.
We are proud to be able to give back to the Sri Lankan population and also our school community in every way possible.
We hope that as Sri Lanka comes together to spread the word about Mental Health Day, we will be able to celebrate this and save lives.
(This is a public interest blog and some information sharing is to create awareness among the people.)
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