Mental Health conference

On the 30th October Youth council were lucky enough to attend the mental health conference at bishops Hatfield. This was an amazing opportunity to get involved with raising awareness about mental health and learning all about mental health and the challenges people face.

We had many talks by professional mental health speakers. This included a talk from Lara from Mind who discussed the stigma around the mental health issues. She also, evaluated and made clear the differences between mental health and mental ill health which was a real eye opener for us.

Jen Beer from #JustTalk spoke to us about her experiences with working with this wonderful charity and explained the importance of telling someone when you’re not feeling 100%

Finally we had a discussion with John Coleman about the mysteries of the teenage brain and why it really matters. This gave us a lot of information on biology and how this has a huge link towards mental health.

As a Youth Council, we were lucky enough to get involved with the event as we love to help people in the community going through tough times and give as much support as we can. At the start of the day, a number of Youth Councillors helped outside with showing people into the car park which was very kind of them as it was a rather cold day! Furthermore, we had a stall in which we gave out flyers thus giving us a chance to talk about youth council whilst supporting the cause at hand. Beth (the chair of youth council) and me (the vice chair of Youth Council) got the privilege of introducing the key note speakers and gave a speech about the importance of mental health. We were delighted to be given this opportunity as we feel it gave us a chance to express, on behalf of youth council, our opinions on mental health and how much we want to support anyone we can within the community.

it was a wonderful experience and we were so pleased to get involved 🙂