Thinking about kindness for Mental Health Awareness Week

Today marks the start of Mental Health Awareness Week. It’s a week dedicated to campaigning and raising awareness about mental health, run by the Mental Health Foundation. The campaign reaches millions of people every year and hopes to challenge stigma around mental health and promote acceptance.

The theme for the week focuses on the power and potential of kindness.  It’s a theme we’ve seen so much evidence of in the last two months as people across the country connect and cope with the coronavirus pandemic. Kindness has the ability to strengthen relationships and develop community connections – and it’s shown that being kind can help our own mental health too. When we do something kind, hormones are released into our bodies that make us feel good, happy and content. Being kind is so important to our wellbeing that ‘giving’ is one of the nationally-recognised Five Ways to Wellbeing – an approach we use in client recovery here at Second Step. 

We’re excited that kindness is being celebrated in this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week. We’ve been asking our own staff, partners and clients what kindness means to them and will be sharing their stories across the week on our blog and social channels. Follow us @wearesecondstep on Instagram and Twitter to find out more. A little bit of kindness goes a long way.