World Mental Health Day 2020

World Mental Health Day is organised by the WHO and is observed on 10 October every year, with the overall objective of raising awareness of mental health issues around the world and mobilizing efforts in support of mental health.

This explanation of this year's theme is from the WHO website.

This year’s World Mental Health Day, comes at a time when our daily lives have changed considerably as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The past months have brought many challenges: for health-care workers, providing care in difficult circumstances, going to work fearful of bringing COVID-19 home with them; for students, adapting to taking classes from home, with little contact with teachers and friends, and anxious about their futures; for workers whose livelihoods are threatened; for the vast number of people caught in poverty or in fragile humanitarian settings with extremely limited protection from COVID-19; and for people with mental health conditions, many experiencing even greater social isolation than before. The economic consequences of the pandemic are already being felt, as companies let staff go in an effort to save their businesses, or indeed shut down completely. Given past experience of emergencies, it is expected that the need for mental health and psychosocial support will substantially increase in the coming months and years. Investment in mental health programmes at the national and international levels, which have already suffered from years of chronic underfunding, is now more important than it has ever been. This is why the goal of this year’s World Mental Health Day campaign is increased investment in mental health.

Our own appeal for funding for Children's Mental Health kicked off in Spring this year, at the start of the COVID-19 lockdown. 7in10 children with mental health conditions do not get help early enough, we don't think this is good enough.  Alder Hey has begun to build a new ‘Clinical Hub’ which will include new community mental health outpatient facilities and a brand new twelve bed specialist inpatient mental health Unit, alongside other community health services. Located right next door to the hospital and within a modern, child-friendly building, the enhanced provision of mental health services will increase current available inpatient bed capacity enabling more children to access the treatment they need, at the time they need it.