The official theme for this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week, as set by the Mental Health Foundation, is anxiety.
Tutor periods this week have been looking at understanding and coping with anxiety and in PSD periods the Middle Fourth focussed on the three Fs – fight, flight, freeze – responses to dealing with fear, controlling anxiety and learning to live with occasional low mood.
The pupils learned the difference between stress, anxiety and depression and understanding how to signpost friends for support. This built on the work in sessions over the past two weeks looking at trust, managing emotions and preparing for conflict in relationships.
On Tuesday we hosted TellMi, a peer-support app that the College has been partnered with for three years, which offers constant support to all our pupils. The TellMi team held an excellent workshop for our Lower Sixth peer mentors, who enjoyed the opportunity to explore different ways to support different types of people whether they are neurodiverse, underconfident, overexuberant or simply just trying to find their tribe amongst their friends. As many of the Sixth Formers have been through similar feelings, they are perfectly placed to offer advice and support through their own lived experience. Pupil feedback from these sessions included:
“I now realise I can self-regulate my feelings by concentrating on positive emotions to lift my mood such as connecting with nature, do some sport or take time out to breathe and relax without feeling guilty. The workshop with TellMi gave us the key principles of peer support which are empathy, reflection and asking questions at the right time, whilst using perspective and our own experience. It was so helpful, especially as we all start to prepare for exam revision.”
This week also saw the launch of the latest podcast episode on Epsom Insight with Jeremy Thomas, a renowned music producer who now delivers powerful talks on mental health and coping mechanisms. He sat down with Lower Sixth students Ben and Holly to share his experiences with mental health and talk about his time in the music industry. This episode is available to listen here.
Luna, the College’s resident Pets As Therapy dog has also been patrolling throughout the week, providing anxiety relief and cuddles to anyone who needed it.
A huge thank you must also go to Gap Year Students Ellie Cooke and Tom Adamson who really led from the front with this year’s campaign around the College, speaking to different year groups across the week to share their message on mental health in assemblies.
