Mental Health & Wellbeing at Chelsea Hall School

Recently, there has been a massive growth in the understanding and appreciation of Mental Health awareness. In the last 3 years, especially with the pandemic, lockdown and a growing feeling of loneliness that has developed across all ages. This year's Mental Health Awareness Week has had the primary focus of ‘how to tackle loneliness’. The goal to destigmatize asking for help is becoming more and more popular and we hope that our efforts will have a positive effect on the people in our Chelsea Hall family as positive mental health is vital to increasing work productivity, building positive relationships and handling day to day situations.

In an effort to address the stresses of work and day to day life, Chelsea Hall School, our wellbeing lead, Matias, and I have started running wellbeing sessions for the staff. These weekly sessions hope to discuss a number of issues relating to mental wellbeing and ways that we can help ourselves and each other. These sessions will be using coaching tools, meditation, positive psychology and other wellbeing tools to develop a stronger personal understanding and growth. Now in the third week, the sessions have been a great success and have been well received from the staff who attend. Previous sessions have included looking at the ‘Wheel of Life’ and how we rate the different aspects of our life and understanding which of these areas need more attention. We have also touched on ‘Intrapersonal Communication’ and how we can manifest a positive attitude towards ourselves..

This week's session was focused on how music and art can be used as an outlet for our emotions and how people are influenced by different pieces of music. In this session we listened to a piece of music and let the music guide our hand to draw what we felt. It was interesting to see the different responses and emotions that came from the same piece of music.

We are looking forward to seeing the positive effects the wellbeing sessions have on our wonderful staff.

For more information visit https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/campaigns/mental-health-awareness-week

By Shannon Fleming

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Lead