Ola Pono: What's on My Mind?

How do you talk about mental health? What does mental health mean?

We started with a KWHL about mental health:

What do you Know about mental health?

What do you Want to know? 

How will you find out?

And finally, what have you Learned?

We talked about the unfair stigma against mental health, and emphasized that all of us need to make sure that stigma stops. The brain is another organ, and just like you wouldn't judge someone if they had kidney or lung problems, you shouldn't judge if someone has mental illness.

Also, we talked about just how everyone in life at some point gets sick-- just a little bit or pretty seriously-- all of us need to know how to cope with mental health problems when they come up in our own lives.

We started with a mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness is a big part of maintaining mental health, breaking destructive thought patterns, and taking care of the story we are always telling ourselves.

This exercise got us thinking: What's on my mind? We created collages with our faces to represent all of our thoughts.

When we had a visual image of our mental states, we learned some strategies for taking care of our mental health.  (See the Wellcast Videos youtube channel for LOTS of helpful resources about breaking bad habits, improving body image, overcoming automatic thoughts, etc.)

Then we created Art Cards describing what can we do to take care of our mental health. Here are some of our pieces!