World Mental Health Day: 10 October

Held on 10 October each year, World Mental Health Day aims to raise awareness about mental health care in the global community.

This year’s theme, Meaningful connections matter, emphasises the role that connections play in supporting positive mental health, including those we have with friends and family, Country and community, supports and services, and ourselves.

One of the most important connections in a child’s life is with their parent or caregiver. Having safe, secure and nurturing relationships with adults they can rely upon helps to support a child’s wellbeing.

Practitioners play an important role in supporting families to build and sustain positive relationships. We have a range of evidence-based resources that can be shared with families to help you in this work. A good place to start could be the Parent–child relationship: How positive connections support children’s wellbeing fact sheet or our Understanding and supporting child mental health resources, which includes our What is child mental health? animation.

Many of our practice development resources also offer strategies for helping children to form connections, such as the Using parallel parent–child narratives to support relationships podcast episode.

We invite you to use this year’s World Mental Health Day theme as a prompt to think about how our resources could support you to help families make meaningful connections.