6 Ideas for School Mental Health and Wellbeing Displays: Promoting School Wellbeing

Mental health and wellbeing awareness is one of the most important aspects of a whole school approach to wellbeing. According to the National Association for Mental Health, 1 in 4 children and young people experience a mental health problem each year. This is why it's so important to have displays promoting positive mental health in your school.

In this blog post, we will give you 6 mental health and wellbeing display ideas with practical tips for creating a mental health display that will help promote wellbeing in your school community!

Why have a mental health and wellbeing display or notice board?

If you are thinking of creating a mental health display, there are some things to consider. First, think about what you want to achieve with the display. What message do you want to communicate? What do you want people to learn from it? It is also important to consider who will see the display and how long it will be up for. Make sure the content is appropriate for your audience and that the display is well-designed and easy to read.

Creating a wellbeing display is a great way to start a conversation about mental health and wellbeing in your school. It can also be used as a tool to support students who are struggling with their mental health, helping them feel reassured that there is support available for them. Mental health displays help raise awareness of issues, challenge stigma, signpost to support and share and promote wellbeing strategies as part of a whole school approach.

With a little planning, your mental health display can be a great way to raise awareness and promote good mental wellbeing in your community. Here are some tips and ideas to help you plan your next display.

Mental Health Awareness Displays

Mental health problems come in all shapes and sizes. It's important to be aware of the correct terminology when discussing these issues, to reduce the stigma that surrounds them.

Your mental health awareness displays can be a useful tool for myth-busting any misinformation about mental health problems or mental illness. They can help normalise conversations around mental health and physical health.

Importantly your mental health display can help build awareness and share the correct terminology around common mental health problems such as depression and anxiety.

Your display can provide short summaries of different mental health problems or illness suggestions of themes for the boards are listed below

Common mental health problems - One of the most common mental health disorders is depression. Symptoms can include feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and worthlessness.  Treatment options include therapy and medication. Another common mental health problem is anxiety. This can manifest as excessive worry, fear, or nervousness.

Supporting mental illness - There are many other types of mental health illnesses, including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and eating disorders. It's important to be aware of these conditions and seek help if you or someone you know is affected by them.

Tips for mental health awareness displays

• If you are going to use a mental health display in your school to raise awareness of mental health issues, it is also important that the display signposts the available support, encourages asking for help and promotes the use of wellbeing strategies. This will help ensure that those who are struggling know where to go for help and that they are not afraid to ask for it.
• Mental health awareness displays can also be useful in supporting and identifying young carers or children that may be supporting parents with a mental health problem
• It is also important to remember that everyone's experience with mental health is different, so be sure to include a variety of information and resources on your display.
• Mental health awareness displays are to be used with caution. What you focus on grows you don't want your displays to become a tool for incorrect self-diagnosis or to cause people to become worried about symptoms or issues which are a normal part of growing up or school life.
• Always ensure you are also creating displays that provide tips for self-help and wellbeing strategies.

Anti Stigma Display

Mental health problems are often viewed as shameful and embarrassing, using mental health displays in your school can help challenge stigma and make it easier for people to seek support for mental health worries or concerns earlier.

Tips for an Anti-Stigma Display

• One way to challenge stigma is to raise awareness of celebrities who have spoken about mental health problems and who are working to break down the stigma surrounding mental illness. Mental health celebrities are relatable. They can be open about their struggles and help others feel less alone.
• Putting images and quotes on your display from celebrities who open up about their mental health struggles can help break the stigma around mental health. These celebrities include Lady Gaga, Demi Lovato, and Prince Harry. They are proof that mental health is nothing to be ashamed of, and that it can affect anyone, no matter how successful they may seem.
• Make sure the celebrities you use on your display are credible and relatable to your pupils or students, this could even be a project for your school wellbeing ambassadors to find out about celebrities who struggled with mental health problems and make a mental health display.

Mental Health Campaign Displays

A mental health campaign display is a great way to promote mental health awareness and wellbeing in your school or workplace for a set period of time. There are often free resources available to download for mental health awareness events such as World Mental Health Day or Mental Health Awareness Week. These displays can be helpful in promoting wider work you are doing to support mental health in your setting.  Find out more by reading our blog about mental health awareness events.

If you need any help or advice, there are lots of organisations and individuals who can support you in creating a mental health display. Get in touch with your local mental health charity or contact an expert in mental health promotion.

Mental health problems can be viewed as shameful and embarrassing, using mental health displays in your school can help challenge stigma and make it easier for people to seek support for mental health worries or concerns earlier.

Young Minds have a fantastic campaign for supporting children and young people's mental health awareness called Hello Yellow.  They have free activity and fundraising packs.

Signposting for Mental Health Support

The mental health display is a great way to provide a signpost and raise awareness of the support available in your school or setting. It is important that the display is not stigmatised. Choosing the right place for your display is key to this.

The places you select for a mental health display with lots of signposting information are the best in places that are safe and welcoming for everyone who needs them. It is important to make sure that the display does not create a stigma for people who are looking at it.

Key members of support staff

There may be staff members that are an important part of your school's mental health strategy but students may not be aware of who they are or their role in supporting school mental health and wellbeing. On the display, we recommend you list the main staff members that support mental health contact people's names and how best to contact them.

Important people to include on the display

• The school mental health lead
• Pastoral leaders and pastoral support staff
• School counsellors
• Safeguarding officers
• Anti-bullying officers
• Special educational needs support
• Accessing mental health support and self-help

You can include lists of self-help support with QR codes that pupils can scan to be taken to helpful websites, local services or phone numbers for helplines such as childline.  

This helps children and young people to know there is support available when they need it. Making it easier for them to find the information they need and seek help.

Make sure you also include your own school's mental health support services and referral pathways or Google forms to make a self-referral to targeted support.

There is a caveat to this approach, signposting and self-help displays do rely on students being able to recognise when they need help and feel confident enough to ask for it. As such, it should only be used as part of a wider approach to signposting and referral to targeted support, and as a tool to back up and communicate any referral pathways or processes you have in place in your school.

Tips for signposting displays and notice boards

• Keeping your mental health display up to date is important to ensure that staff and pupils can find the most current information related to mental health.
• If someone leaves or changes roles, you'll want to be sure to update the display accordingly.
• Make sure to put the display in a prominent place so that people will see it.
• Update it and change it so people keep noticing the information.
• Make sure you regularly and repeatedly promote the new display or updates in staff meetings, tutor time and assemblies so everyone is aware of where it is and its purpose. Your school community will need to hear about this information more than once, as they are unlikely to think about it until they might need it.
• Share and delegate the task of updating the board with pupil mental health and wellbeing ambassadors. They may even have ideas for things to put on the display to keep it up to date taking some workload off your plate.

Wellbeing Displays

Strategies for mental wellbeing and positive mental health can be taught explicitly to protect against the onset of mental ill health. We call this promoting wellbeing.

It is important that as well as having displays that reduce mental health problems, raise awareness and challenge stigma you also have displays that promote strategies for wellbeing.  These can be used in the classroom to back up explicit teaching of wellbeing, or more generally around the school to demonstrate an ethos and culture of whole school wellbeing.

Emotional wellbeing displays ideas

Healthy emotions are key to developing positive relationships and a sense of wellbeing. It is important to be aware of your emotions and understand what makes you feel happy. When you know what helps your wellbeing, you can use those strategies when you need them.

We should encourage children to talk about their feelings, and one way to do this is by having emotional wellbeing displays in the classroom. These displays can help children learn about different emotions and their meanings through learning a vocabulary of different ranges of feelings and emotions.

Emotional regulation display

Emotional regulation displays also provide helpful reminders of strategies for calming down and regulating emotions. These displays can be used to show that you are feeling good, calm, and happy. This can help to regulate your emotions and help you to feel more in control and ready to learn, helping increase pupils' capacity for self-regulation and self-awareness.

Positive emotions display

Positive emotions protect against mental health problems, and displays of emotional wellbeing can cover ways to encourage feeling gratitude, hope, joy, and pride. We also encourage the use of displays that remind us to stop and notice something good that has happened or that we appreciate.

This is just one of the 8 strategies we provide in our FREE downloadable self-print positive mental health poster- you can access and download the poster here.

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Using Pinterest for School Mental Health and Wellbeing Displays

If you want can really update self-help skills, one suggestion is to set up Pinterest boards with self-help ideas. You can then put QR codes that link to these boards on the display. This is a great way to keep track of new websites and self-help ideas, and the QR codes will not need updating.  Pupils, staff and parents can also follow your Pinterest boards on their phones.

Follow our curated Pinterest boards for loads of mental health and wellbeing ideas.

Mental Health Poster and Practical Wellbeing Resources

Download our free positive mental health poster to use in your mental health and wellbeing displays. If you are looking for practical wellbeing activities download our free Wellbeing Activity booklet .

We want to support you to access a range of teachable wellbeing activities that you can use in your school or lessons by accessing our wellbeing resource toolkit, which provides you with 20 practical wellbeing resources for teaching wellbeing in your lessons or wider curriculum and online learning in how to use them.

Accessing the wellbeing toolkit will save you time and also help you feel confident to know what you are teaching will support your students or pupils to improve their wellbeing. Access is available for individuals or staff teams.