It's Mental Health Awareness Week!

#MentalHealthAwarenessWeek is run by the Mental Health Foundation and it’s all about getting people talking about mental health. It seems as important as ever, during this period of lockdown, to increase understanding of how mental health affects our communities.

AIMS Advocacy uses creative groups as a means to promote self-advocacy with people who use our service. This is about building transferable skills from creative conversations, and using these to speak up about the things that are important to them in their everyday lives.

Due to government guidance during this time, our planned creative group work has not been able to go ahead. So instead, over the course of the lockdown we have been creating creative postal projects and sending these out to people who attend our creative group sessions.

Creativity can promote fun, engaging and unpressured ways of putting forward an individual’s ideas and opinions. It can also get us to look at situations from a different point of view. During this time of lockdown, many people are so worried about the current situation. The people we work with have said having something different, and unrelated to COVID-19 to focus on has been a great help in navigating this period of social isolation. As well as keeping people’s creative minds moving, this has meant people can maintain connections within their community.

AIMS Advocacy is looking forward to seeing what creative works our group members have come up with during this time!

#MentalHealthAwarenessWeek #KindnessMatters