Published April 29, 2024

Mental Health America (MHA) released its 2024 Toolkit, called Where to Start, in March.

Parts or all of the Toolkit can be used to promote mental health awareness and reduce stigma.

While adults, individually or in groups, could use much of the toolkit as written, those working with students would need to

• modify various elements
• carefully walk students through some parts
• omit parts

For adult information only. On the download page, the Introduction and the items under Media Messages would be useful in informing an adult who works with students. Those same items would not appeal to most students nor apply directly to them.

Use your judgment. Six items are listed under Fact Sheets. An adult working with youth would need to judge which, if any, of these they would like to share with students, and how to go about sharing them.

Under Posters, three items are downloadable.

• Calendar Poster
• Screening Poster
• Path to Calm Poster

The Calendar Poster features one suggestion per day for promoting good mental health, for each of the thirty-one days in May of 2024. School day suggestions could be read during morning announcements in a school. If a school day announcement would not be adapted easily to adolescent life, it could be substituted with a more suitable suggestion from a weekend. Feel free to trade calendar days!

For example, the May 1st suggestion to “create a ‘calm space’ in your home” might be impossible for some young people. But taking “30 minutes [or a shorter time period] to go for a walk in nature,” as suggested for Saturday, May 4th, might be much more feasible. Simply swap! The more feasible suggestion would be read over the morning announcements on May 1st.

Whether or not to use the two other posters

• the Screening Poster and
• the Path to Calm Poster

would depend on the ages and abilities of the students.

Under Coping Tools are nine separate links.

The first leads to two coloring pages that could be given to students of nearly any age.

The remaining eight links are

• six worksheets
• two additional documents

These might be used independently by older, more capable students, but for younger students would require guidance.

To view or download the entire toolkit or parts of it, visit the 2024 Mental Health Month Toolkit download page.