JOIN US AS WE CELEBRATE MENTAL HEALTH MONTH
While 1 in 5 people will experience a mental illness during their lifetime, everyone faces challenges in life that can impact their mental health. The good news is there are practical tools that everyone can use to improve their mental health and increase resiliency - and there are ways that everyone can be supportive of friends, family, and co-workers who are struggling with life’s challenges or their mental health.
|
WHAT IS STIGMA? WHY IS IT A PROBLEM?Stigma is when someone, or even you yourself, views a person in a negative way just because they have a mental health condition. Some people describe stigma as a feeling of shame or judgement from someone else. Stigma can even come from an internal place, confusing feeling bad with being bad.
Navigating life with a mental health condition can be tough, and the isolation, blame and secrecy that is often encouraged by stigma can create huge challenges to reaching out, getting needed support and living well. Learning how to avoid and address stigma are important for all of us, especially when you realize stigma’s effects:
|
NATIONAL CHILDREN'S MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS DAYNational Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day (Awareness Day) shines a national spotlight on the importance of caring for every child’s mental health and reinforces that positive mental health is essential to a child’s healthy development.
Awareness Day was created more than a decade ago to shine a national spotlight on the importance of caring for every child’s mental health and to reinforce the message that positive mental health is essential to a child’s healthy development. The purpose of Awareness Day is to increase public awareness about the needs of children with serious mental illness (SMI) and severe emotional disturbance (SED) and their families, provide information on evidence-based practices, and encourage those who need help to seek treatment. This year, Awareness Day falls on May 7th. Check out this fact sheet about children's mental health from the Children's Defense Fund to learn more about children's mental and behavioral health. |