Children’s Mental Health Week: opening up to mental health

29th January 2021  |  By: Tim Linehan

This year’s Children’s Mental Health Week, the Anna Freud Centre is encouraging children and young people, their families and those who work with them to open up to mental health.

To celebrate this week, which is organised by Place2Be, the Centre is joining a number of charities and other organisation to put together a programme to encourage children and young people to express themselves.

We are trailing the week with three short videos involving two of our practitioners and one of our young champions to promote opening up to mental health.

The programme for the week is:

1 February

• Promoting our Mentally Healthy Schools’ Children’s Mental Health Week toolkit.

2 February

• We are encouraging children and young people to express themselves by taking part in self-care activities such as making music, creative writing, baking, drama, drawing/painting, crafting, photography and dance.
• Between 7 and 8pm, we are taking part in a Twitter chat hosted by Nasen on children’s mental health.

3 February

• We are promoting our acclaimed animations, We all have mental health and Talking mental health to encourage openness and self-care.
• We are partnering with Jonny Benjamin’s charity We are Beyond on two events. At 4pm we are talking about teacher wellbeing in the current climate – it’s free and tickets are available here. Then, between 8-9pm our Medical Director Dickon Bevington will be in conversation with Newsreader, Strictly star and Mental Health campaigner, Kate Silverton. 

4 February

• On Thursday we are focusing on parental self-care, promoting our resources on social media.
• Our Chief Executive Professor Peter Fonagy is giving a webinar hosted by PESI on, Children’s mental health essential update: the impact of Covid, trauma and uncertainty. 

5 February  

• We are promoting school staff wellbeing – to encourage those in need to use our crisis text messenger service at www.annafreud.org/crisis.