Mental Health Awareness Week 18 – 24 May

Hosted by the Mental Health Foundation, Mental Health Awareness Week will take place from 18-24 May 2020.

Kindness is the theme for this year, chosen in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Mark Rowland, Chief Executive of the Mental Health Foundation, said: “Now more than ever, we need to re-discover kindness in our daily lives.

We want to use Mental Health Awareness Week to celebrate the thousands of acts of kindness that are so important to our mental health. And we want to start a discussion on the kind of society we want to shape as we emerge from this pandemic.

Kindness unlocks our shared humanity and is central for our mental health. It has the potential to bring us together with benefits for everyone, particularly at times of great stress.

One thing we have seen all over the world is that kindness is prevailing in uncertain times, helping people to connect and communities to cope with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

Kindness is also a vital way we can help support the millions of people who were experiencing mental health problems long before the pandemic started.

The research clearly supports this – it shows that acts of kindness can help improve emotional wellbeing. This is true whether we are giving or receiving it.”

Wokingham Libraries support the Reading Agency intiatives (Mood-Boosting Books and Reading Well Programmes) to improve mental health.

Mood-Boosting Books

This is a list of uplifting books – fiction, non-fiction and poetry – which have been recommended by readers and reading groups. We have purchased a number of these as eBooks and eAudiobooks, which are now available on our RBDigital site. Go to https://wokingham.rbdigitalglobal.com/ and scroll down the page, they will be on the third and fourth “virtual bookshelves”. Click on the left or right arrows to scroll through the whole collection.

Reading Well Programme

This aims to help people manage their health and wellbeing through reading. Book lists have been prepared, based on recommendations from health professionals, and we have added a selection of these titles to our RBDigital eBooks collection.

The books are:

A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled – Ruby Wax
The Boy with the Topknot – Sathnam Sangera
Mindfulness – Mark Williams
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – Elaine Iljon Foreman
Grief Works – Julia Samuel
The Sheldon Short Guide to Phobias and Panic – Kevin Gournay
Break Free From OCD – Fiona Challacombe
A Manual for Heartache – Cathy Rentzenbrink
House of Windows – Alexia Casule
Every Day – David Levithan
Blame My Brain – Nicola Morgan
Kite Spirit – Sita Brahmachari
I’ll Give You The Sun – Jandy Nelson
The Perks of being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Face – Benjamin Zephaniah
The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B – Teresa Toten
The Teenage Guide to Stress – Nicola Morgan
Ella on the Outside – Cath Howe
Clownfish – Alan Durant
Check Mates – Stewart Foster

The Reason I Jump – multiple authors (this is available as an eAudio book)

Find our RBDigital collection at https://wokingham.gov.uk/libraries/library-services/e-books/