BY JEM ANSHAW
Mental Health Month started with a bang on October first for Where There’s A Will.
The Upper Hunter has been announced as the winner of the Community Initiative Award at the NSW Mental Health Matters Awards for 2020.
“Where There’s A Will nominated the Upper Hunter community,” founder Pauline Carrigan said.
“So, it is actually the Upper Hunter community that won this award, not Where There’s A Will, we were just the conduit that is being used for that to happen.
“And we totally recognize that we’re nothing, we are nothing without the community, as soon as they pull away from us, we’re over.”
Five members of the Where There’s A Will program will act as a panel for a virtual seminar next week where they will discuss the work they do with the NSW Mental Health Matters community.
This award recognises the work that has been done over the past four years to equip students, teachers and parents with a toolbox of resources to help themselves and others with mental health.
“We raised our money and decided to put the very best wellbeing science of positive psychology into practice,” Mrs Carrigan said.
“And what we’re doing here is cutting edge wellbeing, science of how to stay well, and it’s got to be modelled.
“You can tell your child to have manners and they will follow you, so if you’ve got good manners, your child will have good manners.
“If you practice it, if you remind them, and live it, they will live it along with you.
“Wellbeing is no different.”
Schools play a vital role in this process, as well as families at home, something that Where There’s A Will recognise in their ongoing delivery of workshops and training for teachers across 20 schools and 16 early learning centres in the region.
“Once a term that group comes together in a sharing community,” Mrs Carrigan said.
“So instead of standing alone and just keeping what they’re doing, they come together and they share ideas and they share things that are successful, they may even share a problem.
“The fact that the schools are united in one belief and the community’s backing it, that the power of this.”
One of the hardest struggles faced by those suffering mental ill health and those around them is that it can be hard to recognise and then there is the stigma attached to it.
“A lot of people don’t even know they’re ill because they don’t understand it, I often wonder whether my son knew he was ill,” Mrs Carrigan said of her son who took his own life four years ago.
“If we saw an ugly mole or something changing, first thing we do is go to the GP and say, what’s that? Or ask mum, mum, what’s that?
“It’s got to be the same for mental health, we have to normalize it as an illness.”
